Off-Topic and Low-Effort CW Thread for the Week of July 13, 2020

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-14T18:06:57+00:00

I'd be polishing up my CV. On the bright side at least they're honest enough to refer to it as "indoctrination".

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-24T18:50:19+00:00

Washington Post settles $250M suit with Covington teen Nick Sandmann

The Washington Post on Friday agreed to settle a monster $250 million lawsuit filed by Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann over its botched coverage of his 2019 encounter with a Native American elder.

Sandmann declared the victory in a tweet on his 18th birthday. It’s unclear how much the newspaper settled for.

“On 2/19/19, I filed $250M defamation lawsuit against Washington Post. Today, I turned 18 & WaPo settled my lawsuit,” he wrote.

“Thanks to @ToddMcMurtry & @LLinWood for their advocacy. Thanks to my family & millions of you who have stood your ground by supporting me. I still have more to do,” he continued.

It’s the teen’s second win in a whopping $800 million defamation battle against a number of news outlets including the Washington Post, CNN, ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Hill and NBC.

I think I'll have a coke.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-21T15:56:05+00:00

Rutgers English Department to deemphasize traditional grammar ‘in solidarity with Black Lives Matter’

The English Department at Rutgers University recently announced a list of “anti-racist” directives and initiatives for the upcoming fall and spring semesters, including an effort to deemphasize traditional grammar rules.

The initiatives were spelled out by Rebecca Walkowitz, the English Department chair at Rutgers University, and sent to faculty, staff and students in an email, a copy of which was obtained by The College Fix.

Walkowitz sent the email on “Juneteenth,” which celebrates the commemoration of emancipation from slavery in the United States.

Titled “Department actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter,” the email states that the ongoing and future initiatives that the English Department has planned are a “way to contribute to the eradication of systemic inequities facing black, indigenous, and people of color.”

One of the initiatives is described as “incorporating ‘critical grammar’ into our pedagogy.”

It is listed as one of the efforts for Rutgers’ Graduate Writing Program, which “serves graduate students across the Rutgers community. The GWP’s mission is to support graduate students of all disciplines in their current and future writing goals, from coursework papers to scholarly articles and dissertations,” according to its website.

Under a so-called critical grammar pedagogy, “This approach challenges the familiar dogma that writing instruction should limit emphasis on grammar/sentence-level issues so as to not put students from multilingual, non-standard ‘academic’ English backgrounds at a disadvantage,” the email states.

“Instead, it encourages students to develop a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to them w/ regard to micro-level issues in order to empower them and equip them to push against biases based on ‘written’ accents.”

I know a guy who does WW2 re-enactment as an SS officer and what the English department is assuming here is far more racist than anything I've ever heard him say.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-14T05:04:39+00:00

Professor: Term ‘low-hanging fruit’ is a microaggression because it reminds blacks of lynching

The official definition of the term low-hanging fruit is “a thing or person that can be won, obtained, or persuaded with little effort,” according to the Oxford dictionary.

But according to one business professor, it’s a racial microaggression.

“For African-Americans, if you say ‘low-hanging fruit,’ we think lynching,” said Mae Hicks-Jones, an adjunct faculty member of Elgin Community College.

The scholar and consultant’s reasoning was that the term reminds her and other people of color of Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit.” In the song, released in the 1950s, Holiday compares the bodies of lynching victims to fruit hanging from trees.

Hicks-Jones made the comments during an online discussion hosted Thursday by the college’s Multicultural and Global Initiatives Committee, or MAGIC.

Hicks-Jones, along with other members of the Elgin community, shared “examples of implicit biases and microaggressions, which happen in our communities,” the college’s Facebook event page states.

The title of the event was “Black Lives Matter: Being ‘Not Racist’ is NOT enough!”

Also objectionable to Hicks-Jones was the phrase “grandfathered in,” because she said it is reminiscent of a grandfather clause, which privileged white people’s right to vote over that of black people during the Jim Crow South.

(Reposting since we moved subs)

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-09-04T20:19:07+00:00

Teachers union to teachers: Destroy evidence of student gender identity surveys

CBS Colorado notes that while the JeffCo Public Schools district says it is “unclear” whether surveys about “preferred pronouns” are in violation of state law, it advised teachers against using them as lawsuits are ongoing.

Federal and state law forbid mandatory surveys that ask about kids’ “protected information,” and voluntary surveys must include a parent opt-out.

But an email from the Jefferson County Education Association told teachers that if they give such surveys, to make sure to they are pencil and paper … because “any digital records are more permanent and may be requested under federal law.”

The email also “encouraged” teachers to “make […] notations about students and not hold on to the documents.”

[...]

JeffCo parents claim that since the union’s guidance, “dozens” of district teachers have made use of gender identity surveys. Parents say they’re not opposed to students using preferred pronouns and respect transgender students’ right not to be “outed,” just to the union telling teachers “to break the law and hide the evidence.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-08-08T15:43:26+00:00

German Greens minister wants to establish centers for neighbors to report each other for political incorrectness

Josefine Paul, the minister for children, youth, family, equality, refugees, and integration of North Rhine-Westphalia for the Greens, wants to push through a project that encourages Germans to report their fellow citizens, according to the German publication Focus.

Reports suggest that Paul intends to set up four reporting centers where people can anonymously report other people who are behaving politically incorrect through hotlines. For example, “incidents hostile to homosexuals, migrants, Muslims, blacks, and Roma” are to be reported, even those that are not criminal.

The government of the most populous federal state will spend €140,000 to establish each center. Paul, a former teacher, lives with Katja Meier, the Saxon justice minister and also a member of the Green Party.

“As I will continue to reject non-Christian gender language and gender ideology, it is already foreseeable that some zealous left-wing whistleblower will turn me in in East German Stasi-style. So be it,” responded Dirk Kalweit, vice-chairman of the CDU Christian Democracy faction in the Landtag (State Diet).

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-07-07T21:18:22+00:00

Postmodernism, Criminality, and Madness: On the crazy French origins of today’s crazy academic ideas.

In recent years, one frequently hears the charge by critics that much of what is presented to students in American college classrooms seems “crazy.” “Words are violence”; “Gender and even sex are social constructions with little or no basis in biology”; “All moral claims are relative, and so all ideas about law and criminality are too”; “Human identities are infinite and wholly personal, and nothing anyone does in the expression of identity can legitimately be classed as pathological.” The list of bizarre ideas now commonplace in higher education is long.

It turns out that there is more to the “crazy” descriptor than just a throwaway epithet. A good deal of the warped ideas propagated in today’s universities is the product of alienated, troubled minds that gave every indication of mental illness.

About a year ago, a story appeared that brought one of the most important radical thinkers of the late twentieth century into the vision even of those who never read him in a university. A former friend of the celebrated French philosopher Michel Foucault reported that Foucault had committed serious crimes of sexual abuse against children during his time living in Tunisia during the late 1960s. The allegation was that Foucault, a homosexual who died in his mid-50s of complications from AIDS and admitted having heavily participated in risky anonymous sex in gay bathhouses, was a “paedophile rapist” who paid young Tunisian boys for sex during an extended stay in the North African country, a former French protectorate.

The interest in this story for anyone with an eye on academic politics extends beyond the obvious moral and criminal issue of a French citizen apparently getting away with awful crimes against children. Foucault’s work—a good portion of which deals with sexual identity, criminality, and mental illness—has had a vast influence on leftist academic thought and teaching. Is there a relationship between this writing and the mental health of the individual who did it? And what might such a relationship help us understand about the current academic world, which takes the ideas of people like Foucault—and others in his influential radical cohort—on identity, mental illness and madness, and criminality so seriously?

The question extends well beyond Foucault. A substantial number of the influential European thinkers who produced the literature on which much of the radical American professoriate draws for their teaching were no strangers to psychological pathology. One of the most evident and well-known examples is Louis Althusser, the Marxist philosopher who spent decades in the prestigious Parisian École normale supérieure, influencing generations of leftist students. Althusser was hospitalized numerous times during his life for mental breakdowns and was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. He murdered his wife in their rooms at the ENS during a psychotic episode in 1980. Subsequently, he spent the final decade of his life as an inmate in a psychiatric hospital, ruminating on the possibility of receiving an audience with Pope John Paul II so he could instruct the Holy Father on how to prevent the Apocalypse.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-07-04T06:28:37+00:00

Scout Association faces backlash over new 'trans fun' badge for members as young as four years old which have been slammed as 'inappropriate'

The Scout Association faced a backlash last night after it introduced a ‘trans fun badge’ for members as young as four.

Youngsters were also offered a ‘bisexual fun badge’, a ‘lesbian fun badge’ and a ‘Pride fun badge’.

The woven designs feature rainbow or striped patterns behind the traditional fleur-de-lis symbol which was introduced by scouting’s war hero founder Robert Baden-Powell in 1907.

However, one critic last night said ‘asking children to be “allies” to what is essentially an adult political movement’ was inappropriate.

In promotional material for the Scout Shop online, the Scout Association urged members to ‘celebrate inclusion... with our Pride collection’. As well as the trans, bisexual and lesbian designs, members can buy a variety of items, such as clothing and accessories, ‘to support the LGBT+ community’.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-07-02T16:52:26+00:00

Vanguard holds 'family-friendly' drag queen show with kids, funds abortions and DEI initiatives

Vanguard, one of the largest investment management companies in the world, has launched company-wide initiatives to push Pride, abortion, and DEI on employees, their families and children. With $7.2 trillion in assets under management, Vanguard is rivaled only by the infamous BlackRock.

In documents obtained by Human Events Daily's Jack Posobiec from a whistleblower and given The Post Millennial, it is revealed that Vanguard asked families, including those with children, to attend a drag show put on by the company in honor of Pride Month.

[...]

Photos of the event showed young children on stage with the drag performer, some dressed in rainbow skirts and dresses.

[...]

The company has also expressed its support for its workers to have access to abortions following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade in June.

On June 28, four days after the decision as released, the company released a statement on their internal community board CrewNet outlining their "commitment to healthcare access."

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-06-22T17:57:36+00:00

Universities silent on moving tampons out of men's bathrooms during nationwide shortage

Women’s menstrual products are missing on many shelves in the U.S. this week. But tampons can still be found in men's bathrooms on college campuses.

As more universities focus on LGBTQ+ inclusive initiatives, tampons are more commonly found in men's bathrooms on campuses.

In December 2021, Campus Reform identified multiple universities that began including women’s menstrual products in their men’s restrooms.

[...]

Campus Reform contacted each university and asked whether or not they would continue to supply their men's bathrooms with tampons despite the shortage that directly impacts women.

Not a single school replied.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-06-13T14:35:11+00:00

French progressives come up with another novelty: genderless bicycle paths

The French city of Lyon, controlled by the Progressives, has come up with a new woke policy.

The construction of numerous cycle paths and lanes in European cities to reduce or eradicate car traffic is no longer enough; new perspectives are needed. Lyon’s Deputy Mayor Fabien Bagnon has announced the intention to design “gender-neutral and therefore inclusive” bike paths. This is probably a follow-up to the construction of genderless playgrounds for kids, for example, in Grenoble.

Bagnon, in charge of roads and active mobility across Lyon, announced the municipality’s intentions on Twitter and immediately aroused a fuss across France.

“What comes next? Division according to age? According to the size of your calves? According to the color of the wheel?” the Lyon right-wing opposition responded.

“The deputy mayor of Greater Lyon offers you the genderless cyclist path. I do not understand it. I’m searching how sexist a road can be,” asked local journalist Emmanuelle Ducros immediately afterward.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-05-18T22:36:46+00:00

University drops sonnets because they are ‘products of white western culture’

The University of Salford, a public university in Greater Manchester, England, removed sonnets and other “pre-established literary forms” from a creative writing course assessment, The Telegraph reported.

[...]

A University of Salford slideshow shared with staff stated that teachers have “simplified the assessment offering choice to write thematically rather than to fit into pre-established literary forms…which tend to the products of white western culture,” according to documents cited by The Telegraph.

The slideshow affirmed the change as an example of best practice in “decolonising the curriculum.” The Telegraph defined “decolonising” as “a term used to describe refocusing curricula away from historically dominant Western material and viewpoints.”

Instead, the course will incorporate “inclusive criteria” that better “reflect and cater for a diverse society,” according to internal training materials review by The Telegraph. The materials also showed that the courses could be upgraded by utilizing “a choice of assessment methods” allowing students to be tested “in a way that suits them.”

[...]

Scott Thurston, leader of the creative writing program at Salford, said the course was “often updated to take account of new trends and development in contemporary writing,” according to The Telegraph.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-04-11T05:32:24+00:00

University’s ‘decolonization’ effort: Ask if you’re citing ‘mostly white or male’ mathematicians

As part of Durham University’s ongoing “decolonization” efforts, professors in the math department are being told to ask themselves if they’re citing work from “mostly white or male” mathematicians.

The Telegraph reports that a guide used by the UK school states “decolonising the mathematical curriculum means considering the cultural origins of the mathematical concepts, focusses, and notation we most commonly use.”

For instance, how different countries view the power of ten should be “reconsidered,” as well as Indian mathematician Brahmagupta’s concept of zero, for which he assigned “a different meaning.”

“[T]he question of whether we have allowed Western mathematicians to dominate in our discipline is no less relevant than whether we have allowed western [sic] authors to dominate the field of literature,” the guide says. “It may even be more important, if only because mathematics is rather more central to the advancement of science than is literature.”

Teaching staff also are “encouraged” to use non-Western real world examples. For example, when discussing Simpson’s paradox, instead of utilizing a common Titanic survivors reference, faculty can use “the under-representation of Maori in New Zealand jury pools.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-03-12T22:10:42+00:00

Job applicant sues Bridgewater State U. for asking her to ‘defend her whiteness’ in interview

Donna Johnston, one of ten applicants for three open positions in the School of Social Work, said she was “floored” by the statement, in addition to being told that “Black students may not be able to relate to [her] because of [her] white privilege,” The Boston Globe reports.

Johnston says her qualifications are “superior” to the three women who ended up being hired by Bridgewater State. The university claims race played “no factor” in its hiring decisions.

“Any possibility of discriminatory motive is contradicted by the fact that the university ultimately hired two Caucasians,” Bridgewater State said in a statement. (The third hire was a black female.) It also said Johnston “lacked expertise and live classroom experience and failed to present herself as student focused” in its statement filed last month with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination.

According to the Globe report, Johnston previously had taught at Southern New Hampshire University and Virginia Commonwealth University. She said she expected questions about that experience, along with her “clinical practice, field work,” not about her “whiteness.”

Johnston’s lawyer said “If somebody had said to a Black applicant, let’s talk about your blackness, or how does your blackness affect something, there’d be outrage.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-02-04T17:40:09+00:00

'Perfectionism,' having a 'sense of urgency' are examples of White supremacy, academics argue

The Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis hosted an event that made headlines before it even began, called “Is Professionalism a Racist Construct?”

In the event, the presenters characterized various qualities of workplace environments such as “perfectionism,” “a sense of urgency,” “defensiveness,” “worship of the written word,” and “quantity over quality” as characteristics of White supremacy culture.

One presenter, Assistant Dean for Field Education Jewel Stafford connected these alleged characteristics of White supremacy culture to the idea that “even though we're working really hard, there's a narrative that we're not enough, that somehow who we are, what we do, it's just not enough.”

The host, Associate Dean for External Affairs Gary Parker, noted that “there were some media outlets that portrayed this talk in a less than flattering light.”

Another presenter, Assistant Dean of the Office of Community Partnerships Cynthia Williams, addressed this controversy in her speech, noting multiple times that she was “getting into good trouble” with her colleagues, and specifically addressed the “provocative” nature of the question, “Is professionalism racist?”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2022-01-24T07:28:31+00:00

University language guide says 'grandfather,' 'housekeeping,' 'spirit animal' are 'problematic' words

A University of Washington language guide is calling everyday words used by Americans "problematic."

The University of Washington Information Technology department released an "inclusive language guide" that lists a number of "problematic words" that are "racist," "sexist," "ageist," or "homophobic."

According to the guide, words such as "grandfather," "housekeeping," "minority," "ninja," and "lame" are considered "problematic words."

[...]

"Housekeeping," is another "problematic" word that the guide recommends should be avoided by others working in the information technology industry because it can "feel gendered."

Phrases with "man" such as "manpower," "man hours," or "man-in-the-middle" is considered "not inclusive" and "thus sexist."

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-26T19:54:55+00:00

School cans singing of ‘Jingle Bells’ due to ‘potential to be controversial or offensive’

And that’s all Tappon (below, left) had to offer. But Brighton Central School District Assistant Superintendent Allison Rioux told Lovenheim that “some suggest that the use of collars on slaves with bells to send an alert that they were running away is connected to the origin of the song Jingle Bells.”

Rioux added the district is “not taking a stance” on this suggestion … but it cancelled “Jingle Bells” anyway.

Ironically, the district cited research by Boston University’s Kyna Hamill, who had detailed the song’s racial history (like it being used in minstrel shows). But Hamill thought the decision to can “Jingle Bells” was silly.

“I am actually quite shocked the school would remove the song from the repertoire,” Hamill said. “I, in no way, recommended that it stopped being sung by children. My article tried to tell the story of the first performance of the song, I do not connect this to the popular Christmas tradition of singing the song now.”

The slave collar aspect was not addressed in Hamill’s research. Lovenheim notes Google searches show that bells on horses were used as a far back as the Roman Empire.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-11T19:07:09+00:00

California school district reportedly encourages using witchcraft on people who say 'all lives matter'

A California school district reportedly removed a link to resources that, among other things, outlined how to cast a spell on people who said things like "all lives matter."

That content was included as part of a Google Drive for a "Black Lives Matter Resource Guide." A document on "Writing Prompts on Police Brutality and Racist Violence" encourages high school students to write a "curse" for police and others.

"Hexing people is an important way to get out anger and frustration. Make a list of specific people who have been agents of police terror or global brutality," it reads.

"This list can be wide-ranging, from small microaggressions to larger perpetrators (i.e., people who say ‘all lives matter’ to the police officers who arrest non violent protestors to George Zimmerman). Pick one of those people on your list."

It adds: "Read Martin Espada’s poem 'For the Jim Crow Restaurant in Cambridge Massachusetts Where My Cousin Esteban was Forbidden To Wait Tables Because He Wears Dreadlocks.' Write your own hex poem, cursing that person." Another prompt asks students to imagine a world "with no police."

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-12-08T00:03:38+00:00

Ontario union votes two extra days off for black employees only

An Ontario union has voted overwhelmingly and without debate to allow black employees two extra days of mental health leave to deal with the impact of “anti-black racism.”

True North had previously reported that the Association of Management, Administrative and Professional Crown Employees (AMAPCEO) was considering the motion for its annual conference.

The chairperson of AMAPCEO’s black caucus, Elaine Spencer, claimed this coverage “demonized” black employees and provided all the more reason to give her members special consideration.

“Many of our members have volunteered their time to combat the anti-racism struggle in the Ontario Public Service (OPS) and that has led to burnout, a tremendous amount of re-lived traumas and exhaustion,” she said.

The motion was pushed through with no debate and no indication of the vote tally after considerable discussion ensued in response to a similar black caucus motion.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-20T19:10:49+00:00

🤔

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-08T07:37:24+00:00

State Street bank staff need special approval to hire white men

Staff at one of the world’s largest investment companies have to get special approval if they want to hire a white man, rather than a woman or an ethnic minority candidate.

The policy is part of a drive by State Street to improve diversity within its middle and senior management, with executives receiving lower bonuses if they fail to meet robust equality targets. It has set out to triple the number of black, Asian and other minority staff in senior roles by 2023.

A photograph on the company’s website celebrating State Street Global Advisors being founded in 1978 shows a room full of white men, all wearing shirts and ties.

Jess McNicholas, the bank’s head of inclusion, diversity and corporate citizenship, said: “This is now front and central for State Street — it’s on every senior executive’s scorecard.

“All of our leaders have to demonstrate at their annual appraisals what they have done to improve female representation and the number of colleagues from ethnic minority backgrounds.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-04T14:56:24+00:00

[Matt Taibbi] The Red-Pilling of Loudoun County, Virginia

“The GOP ran a master class on race-based identity politics,” wrote CNN’s Bakari Sellers. “The return of the Lee Atwater playbook. Pretty grim,” is how former Harry Reid chief of staff Adam Jentleson put it. “Hats off to the depraved cynicism and villainy and race baiting. It worked in Virginia,” seethed Wajahat Ali of The Daily Beast. Van Jones last night called Youngkin the “Delta variant of Trumpism.”

Just as McAuliffe had no message apart from trying to tie Youngkin to Trump, these commentators seem helpless to do anything but fall back on a cookie-cutter formula for responding to Republican electoral victories in the Trump era. This drive-by commentary misses the weedsy, multi-layered nature of the Loudoun County mess. Some of the parents I interviewed last night, for instance, didn’t agree with Tanner Cross, the Christian gym teacher who spoke out at a school board meeting this past May, saying his religion would prevent him from complying with a proposed transgender policy requiring the use of preferred pronouns. “I’m a teacher, but I serve God first,” he said. However, some were still furious that Cross was suspended after his speech, essentially for violating a rule not yet put in place.

I met people who didn’t care about “Critical Race Theory,” if they even knew what it was, but were still offended by the existence of a closed Facebook group — the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” — that contains six school board members and apparently compiled a list of parents deemed insufficiently supportive of “racial equity efforts.” Still others were troubled by a controversy involving the process by which an outside consultancy called the Equity Collaborative came to be hired, at a cost of roughly $500,000, to conduct an “equity assessment” based on a report of racial insensitivity at one school.

There is a version of that latter story that is almost too comical to be believed — one reason I have to go back is to nail down those particulars — but it’s undeniable there are Loudoun County parents, many of whom are high-powered professionals working at banks or white shoe law firms, who initially smelled a rat on the finance side and only later worried about the politics.

Also complicating the “Lee Atwater” narrative is the role of Asian and South Asian parents in yesterday’s results. “A lot of immigrant families came here specifically for the school system,” is how one Indian-American parent put it to me yesterday. “When you start messing with that, and say, we don't have a say, that’s when people who’ve always voted Democratic will flip on them.” Reporting about Asian and South Asian families upset about new initiatives to deemphasize admissions criteria like test scores has often been dismissive or caricatured, and that certainly seems to have been the case in Loudoun County, where a significant portion of the people seriously being cast today as dupes answering a dogwhistle are immigrant, minority residents who’ve given Democrats their votes for decades.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-11-01T20:40:37+00:00

How Journalism Abandoned the Working Class: What explains the media's obsession with race and power? It has very little to do with social justice and everything to do with class.

Journalism has become a profession of astonishing privilege over the past century, metamorphosing from a blue-collar trade into one of the occupations with the most highly educated workforces in the United States. And along with this status revolution has come the radicalization of the profession on questions of identity, leaving in the dust anything commensurate to a similar concern with economic inequality.

The recent obsession with identity has allowed these journalists to pretend—indeed to believe—they are still speaking truth to power, still fighting on behalf of the little guy, even after they have themselves ascended to the ranks of the powerful, even when they are speaking down to an audience who, in more cases than not, have less than them on every measurable scale. It has quite simply been a displacement exercise; instead of experiencing economic guilt about rising inequality and their status among America’s elite, members of the news media—along with other highly educated liberals—have come to believe that the only inequality that matters is racial inequality; the only guilt that matters is white guilt, the kind you can do absolutely nothing to fix, given that it’s based on something as immutable as your skin color.

In other words, despite a no doubt well-intentioned desire to ameliorate racial inequality, their enthusiasm for the language of wokeness has allowed affluent white liberals to perpetuate and even excuse a deeply unequal economic status quo.

If journalists once fought the powerful on behalf of the powerless, in 21st century America, they are the powerful. While the average pay for a journalism job is quite low at around $40,000 a year, that’s because entry-level jobs pay so little; at the higher levels, journalists now make quite a bit more than the average American. More importantly, journalists now have social and cultural power, and they are overwhelming the children of economic elites. After all, to even be able to make it on $30,000 a year while living in the most expensive cities in America (the only ones left with a functioning journalism industry, thanks to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of local newspapers), you have to come from a family with enormous economic privilege who can help you out. Once a blue-collar trade, journalism has become something akin to an impenetrable caste. And what journalists have done with that power, perhaps inadvertently, is to wage a cultural battle that enhances their own economic interests against a less-educated and struggling American working class.

Once working-class warriors, the little guys taking on America’s powerful elites, journalists today are an American elite, a caste that has abandoned its working class roots as part of its meritocratic climb. And a moral panic around race has allowed them to mask this abandonment under the guise of “social justice.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-03-31T17:27:31+00:00

Newly unveiled Greta Thunberg statue rankles students, local community

Titled “Make a Difference” and commissioned in 2019 (the same year Winchester declared a “climate and ecological emergency”), the statue cost the school almost 24,000 pounds (just over $33,000) and is thought to be the first commemorating Thunberg, the Daily Mail reports.

The university says the statue symbolizes Winchester’s commitment to “sustainability and social justice.”

But the Winchester University and College Union called the statue a “vanity project” and said the funds used to pay for it could have been used elsewhere.

“To be clear our concerns are about the expenditure and transparency of decision making by the university, which have long been opaque, not the subject of the statue,” the College Union said in a statement.

The union said statue monies should have gone to “preventing redundancies and cuts” at the school.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-03-24T16:48:03+00:00

Demands remain to fire Africana Studies professor for ‘traumatizing Black students’ with Tupac song title

In early February, Melissa Hargrove, a lecturer on race and anthropology in the Africana Studies department, wrote the acronym for “Never Ignorant Getting Goals Accomplished,” a quote used by the hip-hop artist, on a whiteboard during class.

Tupac also used the acronym as a song title.

The school did not respond to multiple requests by The College Fix this week to provide an update to Hargrove’s status as a lecturer at the university, and Hargrove also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

But student government President Karmen Jones told the UT Daily Beacon that Hargrove (pictured) is back in the classroom and students continue to protest to have her fired.

Campus activists met with Chancellor Donde Plowman earlier this month to insist the longtime educator be terminated.

The controversy began when students in Hargrove’s African Diaspora class complained after seeing the acronym written out. Soon the UT-Knoxville Student Government Association and other groups called for Hargrove to be fired.

“Professor Hargrove is infamous among students for traumatizing Black students by eschewing appropriate teaching methods and instead dragging students through generational trauma that exists to this day,” the association wrote in an open letter dated Feb. 5.

The students say Hargrove “created a hostile and racist learning environment for years, making her horrendous actions disappointing — but not surprising.” The group asked the university to terminate Hargrove for her “pattern of inexcusable behavior.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2021-03-22T21:31:24+00:00

What if George Floyd’s killer is acquitted?

Of course, such facts don’t prove the case one way or another, and no doubt more evidence will be introduced in the trial. But they should lead people to have a more open mind about Chauvin’s guilt, and whether that guilt rises to the level of murder. Watching that awful, horrible video, it’s clear to me that Chauvin is reckless – he’s negligent in ignoring Floyd’s pleas and spurning suggestions from a firefighter to help with Floyd’s breathing, and the force he is applying is excessive. But all of that arguably fits better with a manslaughter charge than murder. It’s noteworthy that the charge of third-degree murder was reintroduced to the case recently, which is easier to prove than the original second-degree murder charge.

Given this, you have to wonder: has the prosecution overreached in trying to convict Chauvin of murder? And did it do so for political reasons, to show its commitment to the broader anti-racism struggle? By reaching for a murder charge, the prosecution has raised the public’s expectations, while increasing the chances that Chauvin might be acquitted. Now, even if the jury finds Chauvin guilty of the crime of manslaughter, it will be viewed by some as a letdown and an injustice.

The media are doing the public a disservice by assuming Chauvin’s guilt, and not taking counter-arguments seriously. It needs to be said: it is possible that Chauvin may be acquitted of murder – and that might be a just outcome. Instead, we are in a situation where an acquittal of Chauvin is already considered – before he has even gone on trial, and before we or the jury have heard the evidence – as a totally unacceptable and unjust result.

What’s typically unsaid, but implied, is that anything less than a murder conviction and long prison sentence for Chauvin will be worthy of mass outrage, protest and rioting. By framing the Chauvin trial as an open-and-shut case of racist murder, political and media figures are effectively saying that rioting will be an understandable and justifiable response if the verdict is acquittal. Like Minneapolis officials who have constructed a militarised fortress around the courthouse, they are expecting a riot – and not just in Minneapolis. Last summer, liberal pundits rationalised and excused the riots and arson that took off across the country in the wake of Floyd’s death. Today they are green-lighting the riots before they happen.

Opening arguments in the Chauvin trial are scheduled to start on 29 March, and the trial is likely to last for months. The proceedings will be televised, and the public will be watching closely. It’s going to be a challenging time, and we can expect that people hearing the same evidence will reach different conclusions. Simplistic arguments from political actors pursuing an agenda will only exacerbate tensions and divide us further.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-29T21:17:47+00:00

A professor at USC Marshall School of Business got suspended for using the Chinese word nèige (那个) in an lesson.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-28T18:14:35+00:00

It’s time Europeans demanded reparations for slavery: Over a million people from across the continent were taken by Moorish pirates — when will their descendents receive justice?

As this debate has reignited, fed by activists and unopposed by enfeebled institutions, so others have — quite reasonably — begun to point out that slaving was not by any means only a British or American practice. In the 18th century – the period in which “Rule, Britannia!” was written — Barbary pirates from North Africa made frequent raids on British territory and British ships. Until the Royal Navy put the pirates out of business, historians have estimated that between one and one and a half million Europeans were seized by Moors and taken or sold into slavery.

Why is there no cause for reparations from the states that engaged in these practices? Why has there been no call for reparations from the descendants and families of those who were taken? And why has there been no sustained campaign to denigrate the history and cultural practises of the people now living in the countries of North Africa? If there is going to be an ongoing attack on societies which led the way in abolishing the slave trade ought there not to be an attack — surely of far greater ferocity — against those countries who gave up slave-trading most unwillingly?

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-26T03:44:52+00:00

BLM acolytes are now going into restaurants and demanding auto da fé from random customers. I'm moving up my ”Saint Floyd appears in someone's toast" prediction to before the end of the year.

Alternate source

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-26T03:44:18+00:00

Judge approves due process lawsuit against CU-Boulder for banning cross-examination in rape case

The taxpayer-funded university will also have to explain to U.S. District Judge William Martinez at a December bench trial why it didn’t give Girolamo Messeri, an Italian exchange student, “a hearing before a neutral arbitrator” in his Title IX case.

The judge granted summary judgment to the university on most of Messeri’s claims, including that he had a right to a higher evidence standard and that CU-Boulder wrongly refused to interview his accuser itself.

But Martinez was baffled that the university hid the identity of a key witness from Messeri. Giving him that information imposes “a minimal burden” on CU-Boulder while protecting him from a “potentially substantial” risk of “erroneous deprivation” – wrongful expulsion, the judge wrote.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-17T15:56:10+00:00

Chicago looters smash Ronald McDonald House with terrified sick kids inside

Sick kids and their families cowered in fear inside a Chicago Ronald McDonald House as looters smashed the front door while trying to get inside this week, according to staff.

The charity says more than 30 families, as well as some sick children with them, were left “frightened” by those who smashed windows as they ransacked the Windy City during Monday’s chaotic crime spree.

“[They were] very concerned there was a lot of activity right in front of the house, people making choices that could put them at risk and put our families at risk, so the staff was frightened,” Ronald McDonald House Charities’ Lisa Mitchell told ABC7.

The attacked site houses families so they and their children can be close to Lurie Children’s Hospital, which should be an easy and safe trip just five blocks away.

I wonder what part of "reparations" trying to loot a charity constitutes.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-17T06:52:48+00:00

BLM protestors in Portland just Reginald Denny'd a dude.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-17T01:44:23+00:00

Elementary school ‘whiteness’ lesson: Sympathizing with police is ‘racist’

An elementary school in one of the country’s wealthiest districts will require fourth and fifth graders to read a book which asserts sympathizing with law enforcement is “racist.”

Students at Gladwyne Elementary School in Pennsylvania’s Lower Merion School District will get “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” which also claims it’s “racist” to not watch the news and showcases Colin Kaepernick as a hero in the fight against racial injustice.

According to The Washington Free Beacon, the same curriculum uses “A Kid’s Book About Racism” for kindergartners and first graders.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-12T19:30:00+00:00

The BBC’s bizarre n-word controversy

There are a lot of problems with the BBC’s output, but anti-black racism is almost certainly not one of them. And yet, this is more or less what the corporation has been accused of in the still rumbling controversy over a BBC News report’s use of the n-word.

More than 18,000 people have complained about the piece, which was broadcast on Points West and the BBC News channel on 29 July. BBC Radio 1Xtra dj Sideman has resigned in protest over it. A group of black female professionals has since called for a 24-hour boycott of all BBC content. And BBC staff are still busily tweeting their dismay.

Given all this, you’d be forgiven for thinking the journalist in question, BBC social affairs correspondent Fiona Lamdin, had launched into some racist, n-word-strewn diatribe, or perhaps jokingly started singing along to a rap song in the middle of an afternoon broadcast – blithely unaware that a white woman casually using that most ugly word would be a big deal.

Of course, she didn’t do either of those things. What she actually did was quote the word in a report on a brutal racially aggravated attack in Bristol, in which the attackers are alleged to have used it. A 21-year-old NHS worker and musician called K-Dogg was hit by a car, sustaining injuries including a broken leg, nose and cheekbone. According to the BBC, the family supported Lamdin’s use of the slur in the piece, hoping it would illustrate the full severity of the incident.

But apparently the desire of a journalist and a victim’s family to plainly present the facts of a suspected racist attack is irrelevant. The BBC, having originally stuck by the report, has now said it was a mistake and apologised. ‘The BBC now accepts that we should have taken a different approach’, wrote director general Tony Hall in an email to staff. Inevitably, this statement has been met with outrage that he didn’t cave in sooner.

Of course now that they've issued an unwarranted apology for reporting the news accurately the neo-hisbah will be coming at them twice as hard. When will people learn that chumming the waters doesn't calm sharks?

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-10T06:44:21+00:00

Target Adds “Badge” to Help Shoppers Identify Black-Owned Brands

“We have carried a number of Black-owned brands for years and continue to listen to guests to ensure we offer a compelling and relevant assortment that supports our guests' needs,” Target said in a company statement. “Based on what our guests are searching for, we have started to implement icons online to help our guests find and support Black-owned brands and founders when they shop online.”

This call to action isn’t new — in fact it’s the basis of a historic movement: Buy Black. Its purpose is to raise consumer awareness of Black-owned brands and thus help correct the inherent inequalities many face. For example, COVID-19 didn’t affect every business equally. Between February and April of this year, 41% of Black-owned businesses closed for good, compared to 17% of White-owned businesses. Since BLM began again in earnest, so have the efforts to highlight Black-owned products. Official Black Wall Street, an app that curates Black-owned retailers, has 686K Instagram followers. DoorDash also launched a new initiative to amplify independent Black-owned businesses and Black entrepreneurs in their app.

Der Judenstern, but woke.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-09T18:57:20+00:00

Republican senators’ new bill looks to strip funds from public universities that restrict free speech

A news release from Sen. Cotton’s office described the key goals of the legislation:

• Establishes the sense of Congress that students should be free to express and hold their opinions on matters of religion and philosophy on college campuses; that free speech zones and restrictive speech codes are contrary to the First Amendment; and that public colleges should not restrict the First Amendment rights of their students.

• Prohibits public colleges from restricting free speech and expression on campus, except in limited and viewpoint-neutral circumstances consistent with the First Amendment.

• Requires private colleges and universities that receive federal funding to be transparent about their speech policies and enforce those policies in a consistent and neutral manner.

• Creates a review process within the Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education to determine whether campus speech policies infringe on the First Amendment rights of individuals on campus, on penalty of losing federal funding.

• Creates a cause of action in federal court for the Attorney General or other parties to challenge restrictions on speech and expression on campus.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-08T23:28:31+00:00

NASA to remove offensive names from planets and other heavenly bodies

In a press release Thursday, the space agency said that all planets and heavenly bodies will be referred only to by their scientific names, the Houston Chronicle reported.

Under the new rules, the “Eskimo Nebula,” discovered in 1787 by William Hershel, will only be referred to as NGC 2392.

The so-called “Siamese Twins Galaxy” will likewise be known only as NGC 4567 and NGC 4568.

“As the scientific community works to identify and address systemic discrimination and inequality in all aspects of the field, it has become clear that certain cosmic nicknames are not only insensitive but can be actively harmful,” the agency said in a news release.

I'm sure that these pointless cosmetic changes will a long way to help people who mostly live in the rural arctic without internet or TV.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-08T19:53:53+00:00

Public university prosecutes student for using President Trump as Zoom background

New Jersey’s Stockton University, a 20-minute drive from Atlantic City, charged a student with disruptive behavior, discrimination, harassment, creating a “hostile environment,” causing “harm” and cyberbullying. His violation? Using Trump’s image as his Zoom background during an online class July 1.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is representing doctoral student Robert Dailyda, warning the public university in a letter Friday that it has no legal authority to punish a student for sharing his political views, even if they offended his classmates.

FIRE’s summary of the factual background says there were “no disruptions to the class or other feedback about Dailyda’s choice of background during the class” other than a private chat another classmate send him. Several classmates piled on Dailyda for his Trump background in a post-class group chat, but the university admitted that this conversation was not “threatening” to anyone and that Dailayda exited the chat to “avoid continued conflict.” The student wrote a Facebook post after the pile-on, saying he was “done with the leftist agenda of BLM and the white self haters,” including his classmates:

I’m not backing down. If we can’t get past this, ok, I’m ready to fight to the death for our county and against those that want to take it down. I believe there are also many like me.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-06T05:36:12+00:00

One of our local gyms here in SD has taken the "Iron Church" meme literally and registered itself as a religious organization in order to stay open during the latest shutdown.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-06T00:19:12+00:00

An economics professor at Wright State University is alleging that he has been repeatedly barred from teaching a class critical of Marxism to the general student body.

Osborne said the “short version” of his predicament “is that we have an angry, radical-left cohort in the department, they praise Marxism in the classroom, they will not let me teach critically about it, and numerous people in the university have refused to do anything about it.”

While Osborne has recently been given permission to teach the class this fall to honors students, he is not allowed to open the class to the entire student body, he said. Only honors students may enroll in honors courses. Osborne has been able to teach his class once before, as an honors course in fall 2014. Again, only honors students were permitted to enroll.

After the class went well, Osborne said he proposed it as an economics elective or as a special topics course that any business student could enroll in. Today, all these years later, his battle to open the course to all such students continues, he said.

“That my department is full of extremists who probably don’t belong in a business-college economics department, to be sure, is a manifestation of academic freedom,” Osborne told The College Fix via email. “And I do not want to change how economics is taught at WSU, broadly speaking. I just want my academic freedom to offer a different view to also be respected.”

[...]

Despite the refusal to open this course to the student body, the economics department currently allows students to take a course every spring called Socialist and Radical Economics, “to learn the rich history of critical analyses of the dominant form of capitalism (i.e., historical evolution of capitalist ownerships, capitalist labor process, and its socioeconomic outcomes) and to engage in a critical debate on the prospect of socioeconomic reform,” according to its syllabus.

While Wright State offers standard economics courses found at universities across the nation, it also requires economics majors to take an “institutional economics” course.

“This class is consistently skeptical of free markets and ‘capitalism,’” Osborne told The Fix. “Given the way Marx is favorably assessed in our curriculum, and Marxism’s actual historical record, I really thought our students deserved an alternate perspective.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-05T20:17:17+00:00

The mad cancellation of Kindergarten Cop

Local paper Willamette Week reports that Arnold Schwarzenegger’s movie about a policeman pretending to be a teacher has lost its slot at the Northwest Film Center’s (NWFC) drive-in summer cinema series in Portland.

Despite being rated PG-13 (meaning children are permitted to view it), the movie was deemed offensive by local author Lois Leveen. ‘There’s nothing entertaining about the presence of police in schools, which feeds the “school-to-prison” pipeline’, she tweeted.

Reason reports that the NWFC responded directly to Leveen’s tweet by announcing the cancellation of the screening. It said this decision followed conversations with ‘staff and community members’.

Leveen even emailed Willamette Week to say that, although Kindergarten Cop is just a film, the same is true of the pro-KKK classic, The Birth of a Nation. ‘We recognise films like those are not “good family fun”’, she said, but rather ‘relics of how pop culture feeds racist assumptions’.

Comparing Kindergarten Cop to Birth of a Nation is some serious Poe's Law shit. Looks like we're heading for the Demolition Man future after all.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-05T20:12:38+00:00

"Violence"? Do words just not mean things anymore?

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-05T05:13:37+00:00

2019: Journalists should learn to code

2020: Code learns to journalist

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-04T13:44:41+00:00

Psychotherapists avoid questioning children who want to be transgender as they fear conversion therapy accusations

Children as young as six are expressing the desire to change their gender, several psychotherapists have told the Telegraph, and many feel unable to question young patients because they “could be accused of breaking the code of ethics”.

One psychotherapist who spoke to this newspaper said they have faced accusations of practicing conversion therapy for refusing to affirm any child who says they want to be transgender.

The widely accepted definition of conversion therapy - which traditionally focused exclusively on sexual orientation - was changed in 2017 when the NHS signed a new memorandum that included “gender identity”.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-02T20:12:45+00:00

College expels student for 'racist' social media post, then discovers what actually happened

On June 4, the student, who is remaining nameless, was expelled from the school for allegedly putting out a social media post that contained the n-word. The post was put out by an account claiming to be a student at Wesleyan. The same account also made a Halloween-related post featuring a woman in a green “Border Patrol” shirt posing as if she were arresting a man in a sombrero and serape. The photo was captioned “border?...secured. found him, met him & and just had to get a pic."

According to Wesleyan College Alumnae Board of Managers member Jan Lawrence, the board was told that the student provided information proving that a high school photo of the student had been downloaded and reposted by a third party who included the caption.

“On the morning we learned of the information, we launched an investigation and expelled the student that afternoon, giving her the right to appeal as provided in our policies,” college president Vivia Fowler said in an Instagram post.

The student did appeal, and was reinstated after the university found that “the student did not post the racist content.”

“On July 10, the Wesleyan Student-Faculty Judicial Board, comprised of two faculty members, two staff members and two members of student government, ruled in the student’s favor, overturning the expulsion effective immediately," Fowler said.

“The committee considered new information that we learned in the weeks following the student’s expulsion, which called into question the accuracy of the original information. This information shows that the student did not post the racist content in early June while enrolled at Wesleyan.”

[...]

The school then used this opportunity to tout its diversity efforts, assuring the community that “even though” a student was wrongly expelled, “that will not deter us from doing our part to denounce racism and hate.”

“In addition, we will continue our work, particularly over the last few years, of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. We are proud of our diverse student body,” said Fowler in the same announcement. “We are one of the first higher education institutions to offer trainings and workshops on the harmful impact of white privilege.”

Of course no mention of the possibility that starting an "investigation" in the morning that leads to an expulsion that very afternoon might be jumping the gun a bit, not to mention leaving her little to no time to prepare a defense.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-08-01T17:51:37+00:00

Evolutionary biologist forced out of academia for insisting male and female are not social constructs

But it was his piece earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal that did him in for good:

Even more than other pieces I’d bylined, this one unleashed a tidal wave of online hate—perhaps because we’d pricked the precious conceit that gender ideology saves children instead of harming them. Several Penn State professors publicly denounced the essay as transphobic. Students and faculty complained to my department’s diversity committee that I’d launched “a personal attack on individuals with non-binary gender identity,” and that my presence at PSU “made them feel less comfortable.” …

It was around this time that I was contacted by a biology-department chair at a private liberal arts college in the Midwest. He commended me for my writings, and told me that he’d even used my New Evolution Deniers essay as a basis for discussion in his own classes. But while he and his fellow biology-department faculty would likely support my hiring, he said, the school’s own human-resources department would almost certainly block me as “too risky.” …

Guilt by association is a hallmark of all social panics. And in early March, I received a text message from a close friend and research collaborator who is now an assistant professor at a major research university, informing me that his colleagues had started questioning him about our affiliation. He told me that this sort of thing was happening frequently enough that he felt the need to publicly denounce my views to clear his name. And that’s exactly what he did. Ask yourself what other ideological movements and historical periods we tend to associate with such performative acts. … Later that month, someone again posted “Colin Wright is a Transphobe who supports Race Science” to the EcoEvoJobs board. I contacted the board operator—again—expressing my concerns. This time, I received no response.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-31T16:41:32+00:00

In a recent report from CNN on the new guidelines for cervical cancer screening, the word "woman" is not once mentioned. Neither are the words "female," "vagina," or "uterus."

Yet in 2018, CNN published an article about when men should be tested for prostate cancer. The story begins by saying that "Men between the ages of 55 and 69—particularly those at high-risk for prostate cancer—should talk to their physicians about the pros and cons of prostate cancer screening, according to new guidelines released Tuesday." That story goes on to use the word "men" 27 times.

The guidance from CNN is clear; men exist, and women do not exist. Men can be defined, in part, by the unique composition of their male bodies. Women do not exist. Men have parts of their bodies that are susceptible to cancers that those who are not men do not have to worry about.

Women, on the other hand, do not exist. The parts of bodies that were previously identifiable as female parts are merely their own thing, not part of women.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-30T05:54:04+00:00

Acting could soon be a hate crime in Scotland

The bill is intended to prevent harm to potential victims of hate crime. But it would criminalise anything deemed likely to ‘stir up hatred’ against people on the basis of their age, religion, gender identity or other protected characteristics – even if it is an actor pretending to be racist, transphobic or bigoted for the purposes of a play.

Get ready for mainstream media products to become even more bland and focus-groupped.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-29T03:18:53+00:00

Damn white people and their... shuffles deck... surfing!

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-26T17:25:39+00:00

Now it’s Islamophobic to use the word ‘jihadis’

Some of the alternatives suggested are nothing short of hilarious. ‘Faith-claimed terrorism’ and ‘adherents of Osama bin Laden’s ideology’ are among them. But the most amusing is probably ‘terrorists abusing religious motivations’. Catchy.

But this is deadly serious. Increasingly, we are asked to pretend that Islamist terror is not Islamist terror. In turn, any discussion about whether Islamist extremism might have something to do with the religion of Islam itself is chilled.

Despite the fact that ‘Islamist extremism’ is a term used by counter-terror experts, the National Association of Muslim Police want the police to abandon any terms ‘which have a direct link to Islam’.

But what exactly motivates these attacks if not a radical, violent, medieval form of Islam? It may not be ‘good’ Islam, and Islamist terrorists may not be ‘good’ Muslims. But they are Muslims nonetheless.

Imagine the outcry if someone argued that we should not call the Crusaders Christians. Picture the chattering-class outrage if we were to say right-wing terrorists are not actually right-wing.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-25T19:09:47+00:00

Segregated Denver Yoga Chain Shut Down For Insufficient Wokeness

The saga started in the immediate aftermath of the George Floyd riots that swept major cities nationwide in the worst outbreak of civil disobedience in decades. As nightly protests engulfed Denver’s downtown city-center surrounding the Colorado Capitol building located three blocks away from Kindess’ Capitol Hill studio, the fitness franchise saw more than 400 emails flood in from customers cancelling their memberships after already scheduled social media posts featured memes rather than statements on social justice, according to the Colorado Sun.

[...]

On June 19, Harrington announced on Instagram that Kindness Yoga would not be moving through with reopening on the first of July as scheduled, and instead would be closing its doors forever while apologizing that the studios failed to harbor an adequate “safe space” for students and employees, despite offering segregated classes.

[...]

Davidia Turner, is black and identifies as a witch is now starting her own yoga studio, hosting “Yoga for Witches” workshops. she said Kindness Yoga refused to hire a “diversity expert,” and denounced the company website as “too white-centric.” After heeding to Turner’s criticism over its online presence, Kindness Yoga conducted a photo-shoot only to then be accused to “tokenism.”

Harrington told the Colorado Sun that the photoshoot was a mistake and says he wishes he would have hired a photographer to shoot their classes, probably the ones where whites weren’t invited.

Turner told the Sun that when she explained to the company’s CEO who was a white woman that it was no place for minority employees to fix its racist culture, the executive broke down crying. Turner however, derided the CEO’s tears as “the weaponizing of sadness” which was “infuriating.”

[...]

Harrington told the Sun he’s working to better understand his white privilege by reading the infamous book authored by Robin DiAngelo architect of critical race theory “White Fragility.”

Like a whipped dog turning back to lick the boot that kicked him, these people never learn. Pathetic.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-21T15:11:39+00:00

Damn white people and their *shuffles deck* public parks!

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2020-07-15T03:37:35+00:00

Federal Investigation: Trans Bathroom Enabled Alleged Sexual Assault Of Kindergartener

Perhaps as troubling as the district’s non-response to the sexual assault complaints of Thomas and others was its actively misleading communications with other alarmed parents and the entire school community.

The district’s problematic bathroom policy was grounded in deception from the beginning. The superintendent conceived and implemented the policy in the dark, with no formal notice to parents and no public discussion or vote by the local school board. OCR found that when the alleged kindergarten assault occurred and parents demanded answers about their children’s safety, the district continued to mislead.

One parent was told “the rumors regarding an assault were not true.” Another parent, who was so concerned she checked her daughter out of school, was told “the ‘event’ had been investigated and ‘found to not have taken place.’” But as OCR concluded, no one — especially no school official — had even investigated the incident, much less determined it had never taken place.

The school principal’s public statement to the school community continued the mendacity. “Although an incident was alleged,” the principal wrote, “a thorough investigation involving [school] administrators, central office staff, law enforcement, and social service agencies led us to confidently determine that the allegation was unfounded.” This statement was flatly untrue.

Reacting to the OCR findings, the district still clings to its dangerous bathroom policy by saying OCR failed to substantiate the claims of the young victim. OCR never said this, however. Instead, OCR cited conflicts in determining the precise date of the incident, which it could not resolve given that the assailant’s parents could not be contacted and the incident was never investigated at the time it happened.

OCR was sufficiently persuaded of the mess in district schools, however, and mandated the district thoroughly investigate and document all “alleged incidents of sexual harassment of students in School bathrooms, including any allegations of harassment associated with the Policy” during the two-year period including and following the incident.

I hope they go back and double-check because I've been assured repeatedly by the trans cult that That Sort Of Thing Never Happens.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-09-29T15:59:24+00:00

Texas mother who blamed son's life-threatening injuries on 'white couple' arrested for lying to police

A Texas mother was arrested on Saturday for allegedly making false statements to police about her two-year-old son's life-threatening injuries sustained in February, in which he had suffered internal injuries, burns, and a lacerated liver.

Shelby Martinez, 30, was arrested on Saturday at her apartment complex where her son was injured and has been charged with making false statements to police, according to KFDX Wichita Falls.

Authorities say Martinez and the boy's father, Thomas Gates, tried to cover up how their child received life-threatening injuries.

Their two-year-old son was allegedly run over by Gates when he was backing out with his vehicle, but the couple blamed it on an "unknown white couple," according to police. Martinez and Gates are both black.

Gates was arrested in February, several days after the incident, for the same charge after coming clean to the police about how the incident played out.

Demand continues to exceed supply.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-09-25T20:22:43+00:00

9-year-old schoolgirl scolded for intolerance after complaining about having to change in front of biological boy in girls’ changing room: The girl’s parents were accused of “undermining the school’s gender inclusivity policy” when they told the principal their daughter was afraid to go to gym class

Jessica Kakiay-Yavuz, the mother of a 9-year-old student at the Roman Catholic primary school De Tweemaster in Huizen, told the De Telegraaf newspaper how her daughter no longer feels comfortable attending gym class because she is forced to change in the presence of a boy.

“My daughter came to me because she thought it was strange that a boy came into the dressing room,” Kakiay-Yavuz told the newspaper. “I have requested a meeting with the school to find a solution. The director was initially open to that.”

She explained that after informing the school of her daughter’s concerns, she received a “very humiliating” response in which she was asked to accept the situation and was accused of “undermining the school’s gender inclusivity policy.”

“If I wanted, I could receive information so that I could understand the ‘difficult situation that gender and sex diverse people face,'” the mother was told.

“She doesn’t feel comfortable having to change in front of a boy. This is of course not a situation you want to be in as parents. We have been upset for weeks, I cannot let go of the issue,” she said of her daughter’s predicament.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-09-18T15:21:26+00:00

California Community Colleges system sued for imposing DEI standards on profs

Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), six Fresno-area community college professors are challenging the legality of newly implemented teaching guidelines by the California Community Colleges (CCC) system that require its more than 54,000 faculty members to profess anti-racist and DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) ideologies in their classrooms.

FIRE filed the lawsuit on Aug. 17 on behalf of James Druley, Linda de Morales, Loren Palsgaard, and David Richardson of Madera Community College, Bill Blanken of Reedley College, and Michael Stannard of Clovis Community College. The plaintiffs argue that the community college system forcing them to teach questionable views they do not agree with is a violation of their First Amendment rights, such as mandating professors inform students that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional.”

“These regulations are a totalitarian triple-whammy,” lead attorney Daniel Ortner said in a FIRE press release. “The government is forcing professors to teach and preach a politicized viewpoint they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary, indiscernible line.”

The CCC first formally proposed implementing mandatory DEI classroom standards in March 2022. The following month, FIRE notified the community college system that implementing such required teaching regulations in public institutions would be contrary to the First Amendment and academic freedom.

The new regulations include DEIA standards by which faculty will be evaluated and reviewed for tenure. Schools will be required to “include DEIA competencies and criteria as a minimum standard for evaluating the performance of all employees” in an effort to “advance DEIA principles in community college employment.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-31T15:29:37+00:00

UK politician arrested for hate crimes after retweeting posts defending free speech: Cllr Anthony Stevens is out on bail after being arrested for retweeting a post criticizing the police’s wrongful arrest of a Christian preacher

A Conservative local politician in the U.K. has revealed he was arrested at his home earlier this month on suspicion of distributing written material to stir up racial hatred after retweeting a social media post that criticized the police’s treatment of a Christian street preacher.

Cllr Anthony Stevens, a member of Wellingborough Town Council in the English county of Northamptonshire, was questioned by officers at his local police station over allegations of hate crimes and presented with three social media posts published on his personal Twitter account.

Stevens retweeted to a grand total of 76 followers a post that compared the treatment of two religious preachers, a Christian named Oluwole Ilisanmi who was arrested by police in Southgate, London, back in 2019 for suspected Islamophobia, and an unknown Muslim preacher who was allowed to walk free despite shouting expletives and displaying considerable provocation in a confrontation with officers.

[...]

Lastly, police questioned the Conservative politician about a retweet of a video showing a man burning a copy of the Quran, a post that Stevens insists is aligned with his view that such an act remains a citizen’s right “in a free society.”

It is Stevens’ understanding he was reported to the police by a local member of the opposition Labour Party. He is currently out on bail as authorities conduct further investigations.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-28T18:13:59+00:00

Activist behind US affirmative action cases sues major law firms

The American Alliance for Equal Rights sued Perkins Coie in Dallas and Morrison & Foerster in Miami two months after the Supreme Court sided with another group founded by activist Edward Blum and rejected affirmative action policies used by many colleges to increase enrollment of racial minorities.

The lawsuits, brought in federal courts, accused both law firms of unlawfully discriminating against white candidates by limiting which law students could be considered for paid fellowships geared toward promoting greater diversity within the legal sector.

[...]

Perkins Coie, founded in Seattle, offers "diversity fellowships" that provide stipends of $15,000 to $25,000 and paid positions as summer associates, a position that at major law firms can lead to full-time jobs upon graduation.

Applicants must belong to "a group historically underrepresented in the legal profession, including students of color, students who identify as LGBTQ+, and students with disabilities," according to Perkins Coie, which employs more than 1,200 lawyers in the United States and Asia.

Morrison & Foerster, a corporate law firm founded in San Francisco that has more than 1,000 lawyers worldwide, has a similar program that is open to applicants who are Black, Hispanic, Native American or members of the LGBT community.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-25T16:15:08+00:00

Trigger warning added to EM Forster’s A Passage to India by US publisher: Disclaimer cautions that the 1924 novel contains ‘offensive’ language and ‘attitudes of this time’

Readers opening A Passage to India are confronted with a note warning them of the “offensive“ language and “cultural representations” contained in the book.

The disclaimer adds that publishing Forster’s work in an unedited form does not constitute “an endorsement” of the writer, who is often regarded as one of the greats of the 20th century.

The warning printed in the book has raised concerns that canonical works by British writers are being dragged into “febrile” American cultural conflicts, and unfairly deemed offensive by publishers swayed by “United States sensibilities”.

The warning printed in the opening pages of the 2021 US edition of A Passage to India states: “This book was published in 1924 and reflects the attitudes of its time. The publisher’s decision to present it as it was originally published is not an endorsement of any offensive cultural representations or language.”

The novel concerns a school mistress visiting the fictional city of Chandrapore and the nearby Marabar Caves, where she is allegedly sexually assaulted by an Indian doctor, bringing about a reckoning with racial tensions.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-23T16:52:03+00:00

Feds: Woman who said her landlord was racist made it all up

A woman who publicly accused her landlord of racism to fight an eviction is now facing federal charges. Investigators say she made it all up.

Dermisha Pickett was going through the eviction process in February when she went public with a voicemail and text messages, supposedly from her landlord, stating she was being evicted due to her race.

Pickett claimed her landlord, Sergey Briskman, told her he would "not rent to African Americans" and that he would "rather put a white family in the unit."

Pickett and her attorney, Fanon Rucker, filed a counterclaim of discrimination, then investigators from Housing and Urban Development launched an investigation.

According to court documents, Pickett faked the text messages using a separate phone and made false statements to investigators.

Demand continues to exceed supply.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-21T14:59:23+00:00

UCSF professor: Trans kids who ID as ‘Minotaurs’ merely part of ‘gender revolution’

In a recently unearthed presentation, a professor from the University of California San Francisco claimed that children can identify as “gender hybrids” such a Minotaur — the half-man, half bull creature from Greek mythology.

So said Diane Ehrensaft, because a seven-year-old child once told her that he was a “Prius” — a “boy in the front [and] a girl in the back.”

Ehrensaft (pictured), the mental health director of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UCSF’s Benioff Children’s Hospitals, also claimed in the 2018 San Francisco Public Library discussion that kids “can change their genders by season and can have different identities depending on their location.”

“I totally agree we are in the midst of a gender revolution and the children are leading it,” Ehresaft said according to Fox News. “And it’s a wonderful thing to see. And it’s also humbling to know [children] know more than we do about this topic of being gender expansive.”

Ehrensaft believes transgenderism is the “next phase of the 60s feminist movement,” the report notes. She also introduced terminology such “genderfluid,” “non-binary” and “gender expansive.”

📯🤡

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-17T20:08:50+00:00

Taxpayer-funded ‘inclusive science’ fellowship excludes white faculty

White faculty are excluded from a National Science Foundation-funded “inclusive science” fellowship, in what one legal group calls a “blatant violation” of federal law.

The “Inclusive Science Communication Fellowship” is “supported by a $2.8 million collaborative National Science Foundation grant” and run by the University of Rhode Island Metcalf Institute, Michigan State University’s Knight Center for Environmental Journalism and the University of Rhode Island Science and Story Lab.

The fellowship “will address a significant gap in science communication research and training by centering the motivations, experiences, and priorities of racial and ethnic minority scientists,” according to its description.

A requirement is that applicants “[s]elf-identify as Black or African American, Indigenous or Native American, Hispanic or Latina/e/o/x, Asian or Asian American, Middle Eastern or North African.”

This raises legal issues according to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-16T17:24:38+00:00

Skittles' new packaging has some calling to boycott candy company

Skittles candy, which has the slogan, "Taste the rainbow," is the latest company to take heat from consumers because of new packaging that has the phrase, "Black Trans Lives Matter."

Some consumers are now calling to boycott the candy company for its "woke" approach to support the LGBTQ community.

[...]

One of the new package designs has the sun and the moon walking on a rainbow while holding hands, and another has the word "PRIDE" in multiple colors, a mouth with the rainbow pouring out of it, and the words, "bi, ace, lesbian, queer, trans and gay."

But the packaging raising the biggest concern has a few kids on skateboards riding on a halfpipe with the phrases "skate & live," "joy is resistance," and "black trans lives matter" written on it.

"@Skittles is trying to turn your kids into BLM & LGBTQ+ activists," one online user wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Libs of TikTok. "Their packaging also features a drag queen."

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-14T14:29:21+00:00

California bill would make questioning school board members a crime

Senate Bill 596, introduced by Democratic State Senator Anthony Portantino in February and dubbed the “School Employees: Protection” act, expands an existing law “which makes it a misdemeanor for any ‘person’ to threaten or harass a school employee during the ‘course of [their] duties,'” according to the California Globe.

This expansion adds a penalty for creating a “substantial disorder” at any meeting of a public school board, charter school board, county board of education, and the California State Board of Education.

Although “substantial disorder” is not precisely defined, the bill notes that “course of conduct” is “a pattern of conduct composed of two or more acts over a period of time, however short … evidencing a continuity of purpose.”

Gone from the definition of “harassment” is “unlawful violence” and “credible threat of violence,” and in its place is “torments, or terrorizes.”

It’s not difficult to figure out what’s happening here. A concerned parent at a school board meeting asks a board member a question and reiterates it (thereby establishing a “course of conduct”) … and if the board member feels “tormented” the parent can be arrested and charged with a fine between $500 and $1,000 and face up to a year in jail.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-12T19:24:28+00:00

[Christopher F. Rufo] The Arc of Reform: New College of Florida votes to abolish its gender studies program.

Tonight, the New College of Florida board of trustees voted to direct the administration to abolish the university’s gender studies program, becoming the first public university in America to begin rolling back the encroachment of gender ideology and queer theory on its academic offerings.

The decision, sure to elicit a fierce response from left-wing critics, is part of a broader transformation. In January, Florida governor Ron DeSantis appointed me and a number of other reformers to the New College board of trustees. He tasked us with a challenging mission: to revive classical liberal education and restore the founding mission of the college, which had been established with an appeal to New College at the University of Oxford.

From the beginning, we knew that this assignment would involve more than a “rebranding” campaign; it would require an overhaul of the structure of the college and its programs. In our first months as a board, we initiated significant changes to the central administration, firing the president, replacing the provost, abolishing the DEI department, and hiring political veteran Richard Corcoran as our interim president. We got pushback—student protests, media condemnation, a disapproving visit from California governor Gavin Newsom—but we patiently continued the work, deliberating over questions of governance and making hard choices about the college’s future.

These changes have already borne fruit. Interim President Corcoran has secured millions in new funding from the state legislature, launched an ambitious campus-renovation plan, and recruited the largest incoming class in the college’s history, putting the school on its strongest financial footing in decades. Simultaneously, Corcoran has recruited a new team that is busy rebuilding the institutional capacity of the college, which had atrophied significantly under previous administrations, and designing a new core curriculum, which will begin with an immersive first-year study of Homer’s Odyssey and continue to provide a foundation based in logos (the cultivation of human reason) and techne (the cultivation of the applied arts).

The faculty has changed, too. Through a combination of cultural incentives and good fortune, many of the most ideological, left-wing faculty members, who presided over the old orthodoxy and expressed strong opposition to the classical liberal arts, have left the university. Aaron Hillegass, a professor who said that he would “burn the college’s buildings to the ground” if he were “more patriotic,” resigned. Nicolas Delon, a professor who justified a violent protest against the new administration, left the college. Liz Leininger, a professor who spread baseless accusations of “McCarthyism” at New College, departed on her own accord.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-09T15:47:47+00:00

Illegal migrants should “f**k off back to France,” says deputy chair of UK governing party

If illegal migrants aren’t content with the conditions on Britain’s new migrant barges, they can “f**k off back to France,” the deputy chairman of the U.K.’s governing Conservative party has claimed.

Lee Anderson, the Conservative MP for Ashfield, made the incendiary remark to the Express newspaper, in which he added: “I think people have just had enough.

“These people come across the Channel in small boats, if they don’t like the conditions they are housed in here then they should go back to France, or better, not come at all in the first place.”

Anderson, who has been a deputy chairman of the governing party since February 2023, was commenting on the ongoing migration crisis on England’s southern border, which resulted in a record 45,755 migrant crossings last year, the majority of whom subsequently claim asylum.

His blunt remark was defended by Justice Secretary Alex Chalk, who admitted that Anderson’s language was “salty” but his point “not unreasonable.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-07T16:01:31+00:00

Ninth Circuit rules Calif. community college suppressed conservative students’ protected speech

In what is being billed as a win for free speech, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday ruled in favor of a group of Clovis Community College conservative students suing the school over what they contend is an unconstitutional speech policy that bans inappropriate or offensive content.

The students, members of the Young American’s for Freedom group, had sued the school in August 2022 after campus leaders removed their posters criticizing socialism and highlighting its death toll.

The appeals court this week sided with a district judge’s ruling from October 2022 that administrators cannot prevent students from posting flyers with themes some find objectionable.

“The district court did not abuse its discretion when it concluded that [the students] were likely to succeed on the merits of their claim that the ‘inappropriate or offens[ive] language or themes’ provision was facially overbroad,” the appeals court ruling states.

Leading up to Thursday’s ruling, Clovis Community College rescinded its vague flyer policy.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-04T17:07:22+00:00

Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race: Practitioners of “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to truly become a different race.

Since before she hit double digits, Alisa, 15, said she has felt a special connection with Japan. The high school student, who asked to be anonymous for fear of being doxxed online, was born in Ukraine and lives in Maryland, but she now goes by the Japanese name Miyuki and listens to “subliminals” that promise she will wake up and be Japanese. So far, she believes that by listening to YouTube videos with lo-fi music and photos of East Asian facial features while she sleeps, her vision has cleared, her eyelids have become smaller and her hair is just a bit darker.

Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race. They tune in to subliminal videos that claim can give them an “East Asian appearance” or “Korean DNA.”

But experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race.

“It’s just belief,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of cultural and media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. “It doesn’t ever really work, because it’s not doing anything, but they have convinced themselves that it works because there’s other people who have convinced themselves, as well.”

Though they do not constitute a full-blown trend, a number of racial subliminal creators have popped up on YouTube in recent years, with videos racking up on average over a half-million views apiece. On TikTok, dozens of accounts have emerged in recent weeks sharing similar goals and aesthetics and documenting what people describe as their race-change journeys.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-03T15:57:35+00:00

End of the Encampments? Americans have lost patience with homeless advocates’ arguments that letting vulnerable people sleep on sidewalks and in parks is an acceptable part of urban life.

The West Coast has seen the worst of the encampment crisis, thanks to the 2018 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Martin v. City of Boise, which said that cities under its jurisdiction could not enforce camping bans unless sufficient shelter space was available. Though many cities made the ruling another excuse for inaction, especially during Covid, other local governments have found alternatives. Las Vegas passed a law aimed, in the city’s phrasing, “at helping to connect the city’s homeless population with services” by making it a misdemeanor to camp or sleep downtown or in residential districts’ sidewalks and streets. In 2022, to ensure that enough shelter was available to enforce the law under terms set by Boise, the city expanded its open-air Courtyard Homeless Resource Center, which now provides space for 800 people to sleep. Las Vegas keeps a constant count to ensure that open spaces are at hand in the courtyard or at other shelters, making it possible to enforce the camping law.

Portland, Oregon, which has become an international symbol of America’s homeless crisis, voted last November to ban camping in the city by 2024. Mayor Ted Wheeler has begun creating sanctioned camping sites to provide alternatives to those removed from illegal encampments. Last year, Sacramento implemented new laws to limit camps and increase enforcement. Even Los Angeles, despite fevered protests from activists, voted to ban camps within 500 feet of schools or day-care centers.

Some citizens are using the courts to fight back against Boise and its results. In Phoenix, citizens filed a lawsuit against the city’s decision to crowd the homeless into a notorious area known as “the Zone.” In March of this year, a state judge declared the Zone a public nuisance and ordered it cleaned up. Disabled plaintiffs in Portland and Sacramento have sued to demand that the cities clean up their illegal camps. They argue, justifiably, that the camps make it impossible for those in wheelchairs to use sidewalks. Portland settled with the plaintiffs and promised to start removing tents.

Neither these disabled individuals nor the many residents of America’s cities are willing to wait indefinitely for some utopian future in which every homeless individual gets a free house. They know the costs of waiting are too high, especially for the homeless themselves. Last year, Phoenix and its surrounding county saw more than 700 homeless deaths, and Los Angeles County more than 2,000. One reason for these high (and rising) numbers is drug abuse inside the encampments; in some cities, overdoses make up the majority of all homeless deaths. Another reason is violence. Recent statistics show that 15 percent of the violent crime in Los Angeles involves the 1 percent of the population who are homeless, and that 24 percent of the city’s murder victims are homeless. The idea that L.A. or other cities should do nothing to remove these deadly camps until sufficient subsidized housing is available is absurd.

Americans understand that the homeless deserve compassion and dignity, but they also know that nothing is less compassionate or dignified than letting people die slowly in illegal encampments. They refuse to accept that these camps, almost unknown to American cities as recently as two decades ago, are an inevitable part of urban life—and they are pushing back.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-08-01T15:49:28+00:00

Civil rights complaint filed against med school programs that gave preferential admissions to non-whites

The complaint was filed July 25 by the Legal Insurrection Foundation’s Equal Protection Project. It argues the University at Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences offered two programs that gave unlawful admissions preferences to students who are either “economically disadvantaged or historically underrepresented,” citing screenshots the program’s website.

“The discrimination is apparent: if applicants are black, African American, American Indian, Alaskan Native or Hispanic, they are automatically eligible for the program. Applicants who do not fall into one of those racial and ethnic categories are automatically excluded from consideration unless they can show that they meet the guidelines for being ‘economically disadvantaged.’ The ‘historically underrepresented minorities’ are not required to prove any economic need,” alleges the complaint, filed with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

At issue is a year-round Medical Science Technology Entry Program, or STEP, for high school students, and another summer program for middle school students.

The programs’ website states it is specifically designed to “increase the number of historically underrepresented and economically disadvantaged students prepared to enter college, and improve their participation rate in mathematics, science, technology, health-related fields, and the licensed professions.”

The complaint argues “UB makes clear that students who are ‘Asian,’ ‘Caucasian/White’ or ‘Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander’ are excluded from consideration for STEP unless they meet the low-income criteria – something that students who are ‘African American/Black,’ ‘Hispanic/Latino’ or ‘Native American/Alaskan Native’ never have to demonstrate.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-07-31T15:37:11+00:00

‘Anger and radicalization’: rising number of Americans say political violence is justified

The university’s Chicago Project on Security & Threats (CPost) research center has been conducting Dangers to Democracy surveys of American adults on political violence and attitudes towards democracy since shortly after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

The most recent report marks the first increase in radical, violent support for Trump since April 2022, according to Pape, who directs CPost.

“The public is more radicalized than it was in April and it’s really quite significant,” he said. “We’ve been tracking this quite a while, and this is a really big bump.”

Still, a radicalized public isn’t enough for actual violence to occur, Pape said. He compared the support to kindling, but said Trump would have to give a speech or rally inciting people to act at a certain time to light the fire, as he did in Washington DC on 6 January 2021.

Democrats, however, expressed support for political violence for a different purpose. The survey found support for the use of force to coerce members of Congress to “do the right thing” grew from 9% in January to 17% – an estimated 44 million Americans – at the end of June, with the sharpest rise among Democrats. Support for violence to restore the federal right to an abortion also increased during this time.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-07-26T18:26:33+00:00

Kentucky requires nurses to take training on 'structural racism' and 'white-splaining'

The Kentucky Board of Nursing mandated nurses to take an " implicit bias " course to "recognize the history of racism in healthcare" and threatened "discipline" for failure to do so.

The ultimatum to complete the "mandatory continuing education" training, which was developed by the Kentucky Nurses Association , forced nurses to complete the training by July 1.

"They pretty much said we're all guilty of being racist, and we need to examine the way that we take care of patients and change our behaviors because we are giving substandard care," Rebecca Wall, a Kentucky certified registered nurse anesthetist with 40 years experience, told the Washington Examiner.

The training , presented by KNA Board of Directors Treasurer Arica Brandford and KNA CEO Delanor Manson, told nurses that "best intentions will not solve implicit bias in healthcare."

[...]

Laura Morgan, a nurse of 39 years and program manager at the medical advocacy group Do No Harm, told the Washington Examiner that "discipline" could mean the non-renewal of a license.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-07-24T14:39:43+00:00

DC United: US sports trainer fired for 'discriminatory' hand gesture

An athletic trainer for DC United, the MLS football club in Washington DC, has been fired for making a gesture that is considered by some to be a hate symbol.

The decision comes after the discovery of the "discriminatory hand gesture" in a post published on social media on Thursday, the team said in a statement.

The team did not identify the trainer.

The now-deleted post showed the staff posing on the National Mall. One man is seen making the "OK" symbol, which has sometimes been used as a racist sign.

The trainer's termination is "effective immediately" and following an internal review, the team said in a short statement on Friday.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-07-20T18:29:43+00:00

French riots show that decades of mass ‘colonizing immigration’ could lead to ‘collapse,’ says former head of French counter-intelligence agency: After mass riots during the past week shocked France and the world, the former head of France’s powerful DGSE intelligence agency says the root cause of his country’s tragic situation is above all “the dominant ideology, which has justified and even glorified the massive colonizing immigration that has been taking place over the last half-century.”

Together with the immigration of workers, France began to experience what increasingly became an immigration of settlers (Brochand uses the French term “immigration de peuplement”, which can also be translated as “colonizing immigration”). The transition to a society of individuals has created what he calls a scissor effect. Hence, in Brochand’s eyes, internal partition is the natural inclination of the multicultural societies of Western Europe.

This is not new, as Pierre Brochand said that he remembers when he was the French ambassador to Hungary in the years 1989-93, just after the fall of communism in that part of Europe, he would often hear from his Hungarian interlocutors: “We are lucky we can see first-hand the damage that non-European immigration is causing in your country, and we certainly don’t want to imitate you.”

“In everyone’s eyes, we are now the ‘sick man’ of the continent, the Security Council, the G7, and the G20,” laments the former head of France’s counter-intelligence, as France is indeed the country with the highest proportion of inhabitants with a non-European immigrant background, and immigration figures have been beating new historic records under President Emmanuel Macron.

[...]

Meanwhile, a large majority of French people are strongly opposed to what increasingly appears to be a dangerous social engineering experiment by the liberal elites, something Éric Zemmour has called a Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Western liberals and Islam against the White, heterosexual, Catholic French man. Indeed, 74 percent of French people now think there are too many immigrants in their country and 62 percent would want France to disobey EU treaties and EU law to stop immigration.

The latter is an important point, in particular in light of the ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) against Switzerland that was delivered just a few days ago, which extends the right to family reunification even to refugees who have only obtained a temporary residence permit and not asylum. Let us not forget that EU member states have the obligation, as per the EU treaties, to abide by the rulings of the ECHR.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-07-18T18:09:35+00:00

Parents slam woke Massachusetts school district for axing advanced math classes to boost 'equity', after they attracted too many white and Asian students - with families now forced to hire private tutors instead

Cambridge Public Schools began phasing out advanced math courses in grades six through eight around 2017, when district officials noticed sharp racial disparities in the program.

Students who were being placed in the advanced math track were overwhelmingly white and Asian, while the lower-level courses were filled primarily with black and Latino students, the Boston Globe reported on Friday.

As a result of the change, and following further complications from the pandemic, none of the district's four middle schools offer Algebra I, which some parents say is actually exacerbating inequality by limiting advanced math to those who can afford private tutors.

'The students who are able to jump into a higher level math class [in high school] are students from better-resourced backgrounds,' Jacob Barandes, a district parent and a Harvard physicist, told the Globe.

'They're shortchanging a significant number of students, overwhelmingly students from less-resourced backgrounds, which is deeply inequitable.'

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-07-10T16:44:11+00:00

In NYC, companies will have to prove their AI hiring software isn't sexist or racist: AI-infused hiring programs have drawn scrutiny, most notably over whether they end up exhibiting biases based on the data they’re trained on.

A new law, which takes effect Wednesday, is believed to be the first of its kind in the world. Under New York’s new rule, hiring software that relies on machine learning or artificial intelligence to help employers choose preferred candidates or weed out bad ones — called an automatic employment decision tool, or AEDT — must pass an audit by a third-party company to show it’s free of racist or sexist bias.

Companies that run AI hiring software must also publish those results. Businesses that use third-party AEDT software can no longer legally use such programs if they haven’t been audited.

Companies are increasingly using automated tools in their hiring processes. Cathy O’Neil, the CEO of Orcaa, a consulting firm that has been running audits of hiring tools for companies that want to be in good standing with New York’s new law, said the rise in tools that automatically judge job candidates has become necessary because job seekers are also using tools that send out huge numbers of applications.

[...]

Jake Metcalf, a researcher specializing in AI for Data & Society, a nonprofit group that studies the effects of technology on society, said the wording of the law — it defines AEDT as technology that will “substantially assist or replace discretionary decision making” — has led lawyers that advise large companies not to take it seriously.

“There are quite a few employment law firms in New York that are advising their clients that they don’t have to comply, given the letter of the law, even though the spirit of the law would seem to apply to them,” Metcalf said.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-07-03T21:47:23+00:00

A Battle for Cultural Survival: In the face of the Left’s hyper-aggressive transgender ideology, conservatives must reassert the legitimacy of bourgeois norms.

Anyone with even a glancing exposure to the media over the past several years knows that conservatives are waging a “culture war.” Republicans have been advocating and all too often implementing hurtful changes to settled social arrangements, proclaim the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets on a near-daily basis. This culture war arises primarily out of “hate and fear,” according to President Joe Biden, but pecuniary motives play a role as well, as GOP operatives try to stir up the base and shake it down for donations.

Coverage of this alleged culture war demonstrates the Left’s most important power: the ability to set the default. The Left engineers disruption after disruption to longstanding social practices, each more sweeping than the last. And as soon as those changes are in place, they become the norm, treated as having existed from time immemorial. Questioning that new default is painted as churlish and radical. The Left never has to meet a burden of proof to implement its changes; the burden falls exclusively on conservatives seeking to restore a once-uncontroversial tradition. Though conservatives are portrayed as the aggressors, in reality they are always on the defensive, fighting a rearguard action.

Default-setting shows up across the cultural landscape, whether regarding the requirement that college faculty swear fealty to racial preferences (a.k.a. “diversity”) as a condition of employment, or regarding the introduction of politicized concepts such as “intersectionality” and white privilege into the K-12 curriculum. Its most stunning instantiation, however, is transgender ideology.

The trans revolution has unfolded in a micro percentage of a nanosecond in the context of millions of years of human development. It has introduced ideas that would have been incomprehensible to every previous generation of humanity, whether they found themselves on the African, Asian, American, or European continents. As recently as the 1980s, “trans issues” had not surfaced even among gender theorists themselves, according to the field’s progenitor, Judith Butler.

But now that academic gender theorists have managed to infiltrate their startling creed into virtually every mainstream American institution, contradicting millennia of human experience and centuries of scientific confirmation of that experience, any dissent from the new default is portrayed as a war against the natural order of things, branding the dissenters as hateful and even homicidal. In the 2000s, some feminists—at least those not cowed by the charge of Islamophobia—were expressing opposition to clitorectomies. Now, medical procedures that make genital cutting look therapeutic have been rebranded as “health care,” and opposition to the disembowelment of a youth’s reproductive apparatus is branded as barbaric.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-29T18:12:45+00:00

New York State’s Directive to Schools: Lie to Parents - Secret gender transition is now the default policy for the state’s public schools.

Earlier this week, the New York State Department of Education (NYSED) published a “legal update and best practice” document for how schools should serve “transgender and gender expansive” students. The key takeaway: if your child decides that he or she wants to socially transition to the opposite gender, it is now a “best practice” for the school to lie to you about it.

“Only the student,” the NYSED declares, “knows whether it is safe to share their identity with a caregiver.” The baseline assumption, then, is that “unaffirming” parents are dangerous to their children. If Kevin wants to go by “Kimi” but doesn’t want his parents to know, the best practice, according to NYSED, is as follows: “The teachers call her Kimi and use she/her pronouns at school. When calling home for any reason, teachers use the name Kevin and he/him pronouns.”

Leading experts like Hilary Cass, a medical doctor who documented rampant malpractice in England’s Tavistock child gender clinic, have explained that social transition is not a neutral act but rather an active psychosocial and arguably even medical intervention. Finnish medical authorities have discouraged gender self-identification for children, recognizing its potential to disrupt healthy development and result in unnecessary medicalization. While activists believe that transition is beneficial to mental health, a new study in the U.K. finds no improvement for socially transitioned kids relative to control groups. Evidence suggests that treating children as if they are the opposite sex can cause their feelings of gender dysphoria to persist and increase the likelihood that they will seek experimental hormonal intervention.

If the NYSED has its way, schools will also effectively market experimental hormonal interventions. Its new policy recommends that all schools, at a minimum, adhere to the guidelines of the National Sex Education Standards, which state that children should learn about puberty blockers by fifth grade. It may be doubted whether schools would provide the full medical picture concerning the use of puberty blockers, including the lack of evidence for their benefits, the serious long-term side effects, and the near-certain progression to cross-sex hormones that can cause permanent sexual dysfunction and sterility.

The National Sex Education Standards also recommend introducing children to the concept of “gender identity” starting in kindergarten. As a next step, NYSED recommends that staff actively solicit sexual and gender information by “ask[ing] students which terms they use and generally us[ing] the term the student uses to describe themselves.” (This includes terms such as “agender,” which “refers to a person who does not identify with or experience any gender, [and] is different from nonbinary because many nonbinary people do experience gender.”) In New York, schools now apparently stand ready to tell five-year-olds that they might have been born in the wrong body, socially transition them behind their parents’ backs, and steer them toward experimental hormonal interventions.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-26T13:09:58+00:00

Black county staff claim ‘harm’ over woke Juneteenth email

A group of black King County Metro employees says they’re livid over a woke email celebrating Juneteenth. They’re now demanding race-based hiring and reeducation around diversity issues.

[...]

O’Claire said that staff must “recognize” that “racism is still at the forefront of our nation.” She asked that Juneteenth be an “opportunity to recognize the injustices still being waged against Black and Indigenous people and reflect on how we can disrupt business as usual and replace it with something better.” She did not offer any specific examples of injustices or what to do about it but offered a link to Equity and Social Justice training, paid for by the county.

It’s the kind of pandering email you’d expect from a white “ally” hoping to make black friends. And it didn’t go over so well with some black employees.

[...]

The open letter, which was signed “The Black staff that you lead,” calls O’Claire’s woke Juneteenth newsletter “disrespectful and offensive” because it “furthers the anti-Black culture here in the County.” The employees take issue with O’Claire, including Indigenous people in referencing Juneteenth.

“It supports the erasure of Black Americans, the descendants of those enslaved during chattel slavery, by showing that Black American struggles, efforts, and contributions can only be acknowledged when paired with other people of color,” the letter states. “It also highlights the lack of Black American representation in the Director’s office, your office, and the danger of using the acronym BIPOC. Our struggles continue to be conflated with one another.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-21T14:40:12+00:00

No whammy, no whammy, no whammy...

Major medical group declares Body Mass Index ‘racist’

A national medical group declared that the Body Mass Index is “racist” and medical professionals should be educated on its dark history.

“Delegates at the Annual Meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA) House of Delegates adopted [a] policy aimed at clarifying how body mass index (BMI) can be used as a measure in medicine,” the group announced. A council within the AMA researched the “problematic history with BMI.”

“The report also outlined the harms and benefits of using BMI and pointed to BMI as an imperfect way to measure body fat in multiple groups given that it does not account for differences across race/ethnic groups, sexes, genders, and age-span, the AMA stated. It did not link to a copy of the report. “Given the report’s findings, the new policy supports AMA in educating physicians on the issues with BMI and alternative measures for diagnosing obesity.”

The group announced:

Under the newly adopted policy, the AMA recognizes issues with using BMI as a measurement due to its historical harm, its use for racist exclusion, and because BMI is based primarily on data collected from previous generations of non-Hispanic white populations. Due to significant limitations associated with the widespread use of BMI in clinical settings, the AMA suggests that it be used in conjunction with other valid measures of risk such as, but not limited to, measurements of visceral fat, body adiposity index, body composition, relative fat mass, waist circumference and genetic/metabolic factors.

[...]

Some medical professionals have previously called BMI “racist” and linked it to “body terrorism.”

Ironically if fatties spent as much time doing actual gymnastics as they do mental gymnastics they wouldn't be fat any more.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-20T19:03:35+00:00

Stop Defending Yourselves, New Yorkers! The city prosecutes another case of subway self-defense.

Last week, while riding a northbound J train through once-posh Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 20-year-old Jordan Williams and his girlfriend were accosted by Devictor Ouedraogo, a 36-year-old ex-con who had served three and a half years in prison for an attempted robbery. After completing his term, Ouedraogo was released to the custody of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), suggesting that he is or was an illegal immigrant.

According to eyewitnesses, Ouedraogo was verbally and physically harassing other passengers in the subway car before approaching Williams and his girlfriend, who remains unnamed and has not commented on the incident. After Ouedraogo propositioned his girlfriend, Williams verbally warned him to back off. Ouedraogo allegedly responded by punching both Williams and his girlfriend in the face.

In what sounds like a legal exercise of the right to self-defense under New York law, Williams then reportedly rose to protect himself, his girlfriend, and others from Ouedraogo, who fought back. During the altercation, Williams pulled out a pocketknife and stabbed Ouedraogo, who stumbled out of the subway at the next stop. He received medical attention but later died at a hospital. As with Jordan Neely, the homeless drug addict with a criminal record who died after being restrained in a chokehold by Daniel Penny last month, no autopsy of Ouedraogo has been released, fanning speculation that the results could indicate serious drug abuse.

Williams and his girlfriend continued their subway ride, but NYPD officers apprehended them at a station down the line shortly afterward. Williams was arrested and charged with manslaughter and “criminal possession of a weapon.” (Knives are forbidden on city transit, though this has not stopped knife incidents from increasing 126 percent over last year.)

The Brooklyn district attorney’s office wanted Williams held at Riker’s Island on $100,000 bail, an impossible sum for him and his family to pay, but last Thursday a judge released him from custody without bail, in part because his employment record at FedEx suggested that he was neither a career criminal nor a flight risk. Unfortunately, FedEx fired Williams the next day, showing little interest in the facts of the case or in now-quaint notions about the presumption of innocence.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-20T13:51:07+00:00

Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations - some are not happy

Auckland surgeons are now being required to consider a patient’s ethnicity alongside other factors when deciding who should get an operation first.

Several surgeons say they are upset by the policy, which was introduced in Auckland in February and gave priority to Māori and Pacific Island patients - on the grounds that they have historically had unequal access to healthcare.

Health officials stress that ethnicity is just one of five factors considered in deciding when a person gets surgery, and that it is an important step in addressing poor health outcomes within Māori and Pacific populations.

Te Whatu Ora - Health New Zealand has introduced an Equity Adjustor Score, which aims to reduce inequity in the system by using an algorithm to prioritise patients according to clinical priority, time spent on the waitlist, geographic location (isolated areas), ethnicity, and deprivation level.

In the ethnicity category, Māori and Pasifika are top of the list, while European New Zealanders and other ethnicities, like Indian and Chinese, are lower-ranked.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-16T16:04:42+00:00

Johns Hopkins pulls definition of lesbian as ‘non-man attracted to non-men’ after backlash

“Upon becoming aware of the language in question, we have begun working to determine the origin and context of the glossary’s definitions. We have removed the page from our website while we gather more information,” Jill Rosen, director of media relations at the school, told The Messenger in an emailed statement.

As of Wednesday, the glossary page appears removed from the website and campus leaders distanced themselves from the controversial definition, leaving a short explanation on the scrubbed page that “the definitions were not reviewed or approved by ODI leadership and the language in question has been removed pending review.”

Previously, under “lesbian,” the school stated as a definition: “A non-man attracted to non-men.”

“While past definitions refer to ‘lesbian’ as a woman who is emotionally, romantically, and/or sexually attracted to other women, this updated definition includes non-binary people who may also identify with the label,” the definition continued.

A gay man, however, was still defined as “a man who is . . . attracted to other men, or who identifies as a member of the gay community,” National Review reported yesterday.

🤡🌎🚂

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-14T15:30:15+00:00

Anatomy of a Scientific Scandal: Under pressure, a journal once notable for its courage retracts a major paper on the social roots of gender-related distress—all over a minor, inconsistently applied technicality.

On April 18, only weeks after the paper was published, Bailey received a list of questions from the executive committee of the International Academy of Sex Research (IASR) about the Institutional Review Board (IRB) ethics-approval process at Northwestern University, where Bailey works. The following day, a message from IASR’s Executive Committee began circulating on its listserv notifying recipients of “significant concerns about the ethical conduct and integrity of the editorial process” at ASB. Members were told that IASR was consulting with the journal’s editor and its publisher, Springer Nature, to address these concerns.

Springer Nature reached out to Bailey on April 28. “Some questions have been raised about the article,” the publisher wrote, “and we are investigating them together with our Research Integrity Group.” The email’s focus was entirely on the IRB ethics approval process obtained before publication, which is a formal procedure that applies to all proposed research on human subjects to ensure it is conducted ethically and that participants are properly safeguarded. Springer asked Bailey to “provide details regarding the protocol you submitted to your IRB for evaluation and any relevant documentation regarding the evaluation process.”

Two weeks later, on May 5, an open letter addressed to both the IASR and Springer Nature was published. The letter called for the removal of Kenneth Zucker from his position as editor-in-chief at ASB in response to his decision to publish Diaz and Bailey’s study. The letter had 100 main signatories, including Marci Bowers, president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and a slew of other academics and medical professionals. All threatened that they would “no longer submit to the journal, act as peer reviewers, or serve in an editorial capacity until Dr Zucker is replaced with an editor who has a demonstrated record of integrity on LGBTQ+ matters and, especially, trans matters.” Specifically, the letter asserted that Zucker’s decision to publish the study “threatens the foundations of research ethics” because the paper’s authors had not obtained IRB ethics approval before data collection and publication.

Bailey promptly addressed the concerns regarding IRB ethics approval. The initial survey data used in the study, he explained, was gathered by the paper’s lead author, the pseudonymous Diaz, who is not affiliated with an institution that requires IRB approval for such a project. Moreover, Northwestern’s IRB representative informed Bailey that, though the IRB could not retrospectively approve the pre-collected data, it would permit him to coauthor a paper on those data provided they were expunged of all personal identifiable information. Significantly, Springer’s own policy explicitly states that in situations where “a study has not been granted ethics committee approval prior to commencing. . . . The decision on whether to proceed to peer review in such cases is at the Editor’s discretion.” Thus, all efforts to undermine the study or discredit Zucker’s decision to review and publish it on the grounds of IRB considerations appeared futile.

[...]

The activist playbook here was simple: get the Diaz and Bailey paper retracted over a technicality, then spin the retraction as an invalidation of the study’s main findings. Such a tactic was successfully used on Littman’s 2018 ROGD paper; the journal’s decision to re-review the paper and issue a “correction” has been repeatedly and disingenuously leveraged by proponents of “gender-affirming” care to declare the study “debunked.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-12T15:38:00+00:00

Kids subjected to bizarre nude performance at 'all ages' Oregon State drag event

The drag performance—called “Illegal Drag Show”—openly encouraged LGBTQ members to “Be Gay. Do Crime." An Instagram post advertised the event to "all ages," alongside a note that it would contain "adult themes."

Rebecca Lang, Students for Life President at Oregon State, told Campus Reform on June 6 that “The show consisted of extremely explicit sexual content including sexually provocative performances by men and women in drag and costumes.” She also noted that minors were present at the show.

Multiple eyewitness sources confirmed to Campus Reform that at least four small children were present during the entire show. “Two who were so small two adults had to sit them on their laps so they could see,” Lang said.

In exclusive footage, one performer—who appears to be a biological woman—fully exposes her breasts for the audience by stripping off all upper body clothing. The performer then tries to hold various objects under them, such as a wooden sword and "five pound" weights. Footage shows the individual eventually bringing out a ladder, as a "trans-masc" associate joins her to assist with the "titty weight lifting" feat.

Footage also shows one of the drag queens leading a child on stage to be interviewed in front of the cheering audience. As the performer interviews, the child responds to a question with, "He's a full grown man.".

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-08T13:57:48+00:00

‘Mass immigration and poor integration does not work!’ – Swedish PM calls for strictest migration policy in the EU: Reforms to Sweden’s migration policy will see a stronger focus on language proficiency and an appreciation of the country’s cultural heritage and customs

Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson has called for a radical shift in the country’s migration policy, insisting it is too easy for foreign nationals to acquire Swedish citizenship and claiming many newcomers to the country do not understand the Swedish language or its laws.

Writing in the Aftonbladet newspaper on Tuesday to mark the National Day of Sweden, the leader of the center-right Moderate Party said that his government would ensure new arrivals have not committed crimes in their home countries, and appreciate and respect Sweden’s cultural heritage.

“Let me be clear: Massive immigration and poor integration just doesn’t work. That is why we are now changing Sweden’s migration policy and making it the strictest in the EU,” Kristersson wrote.

“A ‘no’ to asylum means ‘no’ and you have to leave the country. That should be obvious, but it’s not,” Kristersson noted. “Equally important, a ‘yes’ should mean that you really get involved in Swedish society,” he added.

The Swedish prime minister outlined several aspects of the country’s current migration policy he intends to reform, and said it is “high time for us to build Sweden together and bridge the exclusion.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-06-05T16:44:55+00:00

Parched Earth: ANC introduces Race Quotas for water use

Hot on the heels of newly-gazetted draft Race Quotas designed to ban entire groups of South Africans from employment in certain sectors and provinces, the ANC government has now also gazetted race quotas that will determine access to water on the basis of skin colour.

The draft regulations, published by Minister of Water Senzo Mchunu on 19 May, introduce race quotas for the allocation of water use licences, which are vital to the survival of businesses in sectors such as agriculture, forestry and mining.

Under the ANC’s new water race quotas, applicants that use more than 250 000 m3 or withdraw more than a set minimum amount from streams need to meet strict racial quotas in order to get access to water – the single most critical resource required for life, livestock, agriculture and industry. Depending on the size of their water need, farmers or companies that have not “allocated” between 25% and 75% of its shares to what the regulations call “blacks,” will be denied access to water.

The consequences will be particularly devastating for the farmers who feed us all. 60% of South Africa’s water resources are currently used by agriculture to grow the food we all eat.

Under these water race quotas, livestock will be left to die from thirst because a farmer has the “wrong” skin colour. Fields will go fallow because those who till it are “undesirable.” Hundreds of thousands of workers, from all backgrounds, will lose their jobs as the parched agriculture and mining industries wither and die.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-25T16:01:32+00:00

TikTok teen 'Mizzy' claims 'uproar' over his 'pranks' is because he is a 'black male': A teenage TikTok 'content-creator' who shared videos of himself apparently snatching a dog from a woman, entering strangers' homes and tearing up books in a library reportedly said the "uproar" over his activities is because he is a "black male doing these things."

Bacari Ogarro, 18, made the claim in an interview that was published just hours after it was reported that police had visited his family home in London. Ogarro is believed to go by the name of ‘Mizzy’ on TikTok.

Mizzy's videos have sparked outrage this week - with MPs and ministers among those calling for police action. In one video, 'Mizzy' was seen startling a young family, the mother of whom had been in the front patio sweeping and left their front door open.

The video opened with 'Mizzy' and two friends saying: “Walking into random houses, let’s go”. He then entered the house, attracting the attention of a woman in the front garden, before brazenly entering the hallway while young children were heard shouting: “Daddy”.

Another video uploaded to the Mizzy TikTok account shows him approaching an elderly woman on a park bench. He then picks up dog and runs off with it. And, in another video, 'Mizzy' approaches random young women at Stoke Newington overground station and asks them if they want to die.

Ogarro has previously been arrested over a 'prank' which involved 'leapfrogging' orthodox Jews at a bus stop. He claimed he was held by police for 36 hours over the incident.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-22T14:17:20+00:00

Republicans Advance Bill to Defund House Office of Diversity and Inclusion

The House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee held its markup for the Fiscal Year 2024 bill, which would defund the House Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

The House Office of Diversity and Inclusion was established in the 116th Congress when then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Democrats took over Congress’s lower chamber.

The office seeks to:

… foster diversity among House employing offices, so that the House workforce reflects the diversity of America.

Additionally, the office will develop and conduct a survey to evaluate diversity in House employing offices.

The 116th Congress is the most diverse class of members in the history of Congress. More than one-in-five voting members, 22%, of the House and Senate are racial or ethnic minorities. A key component to ensuring the House celebrates and retains diversity is to promote policies which assist member offices in hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. Congressional staffers make a direct impact on the lives and wellbeing of millions of Americans, these staffers should reflect our rich diversity.

“DEI offices have no place in Congress or the rest of the federal government,” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) said in a written statement. “I’m glad that Republicans on the Legislative Branch Subcommittee agreed with our letter and defunded House Office of Diversity and Inclusion. It is a good start, and the Anti-Woke Caucus is calling on all Republicans appropriators to follow their lead and defund DEI programs in every federal agency.”

“Congress should not be funding racist and divisive programs that further split our nation only to advance woke, left-wing propaganda,” Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said in a written statement.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-20T19:49:37+00:00

Student banned from wearing ‘There are only two genders’ T-shirt sues school

A 12-year-old honor roll student filed a First Amendment lawsuit on Wednesday against his middle school for its officials’ refusal to allow him to wear a T-Shirt that states: “There are only two genders.”

Seventh-grader Liam Morrison, in his lawsuit against those who oversee Nichols Middle School in Middleborough, Mass., argues that its speech policy is unconstitutional because it’s overly broad, infringes on his First Amendment rights, and allows campus leaders to enforce viewpoint discrimination.

The federal lawsuit repeatedly points out how the school celebrates LGBTQ themes, including during “Pride Month,” when students are encouraged to express themselves, yet Morrison’s belief there are only two sexes, male and female, is deemed a violation of the school’s speech policy.

“This isn’t about a T-shirt; this is about a public school telling a seventh grader that he isn’t allowed to hold a view that differs from the school’s preferred orthodoxy,” said Tyson Langhofer, an attorney with Alliance Defending Freedom, which represents Morrison along with the Massachusetts Family Institute.

Langhofer, in a news release, added: “Public school officials can’t censor Liam’s speech by forcing him to remove a shirt that states a scientific fact. Doing so is a gross violation of the First Amendment.”

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-15T15:55:16+00:00

Muslim students attack LGBTQ sensitivity training in Belgium, spit on LGBT flag, chant ‘Allah Akbar’

A large group of Muslim students attacked an LGBTQIA+ association’s stand promoting diversity in society during the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHOT), with the incident taking place outside the Atlas College of Science and Innovation in the city of Genk in Belgium

During the incident, the two city municipal organizers and one volunteer from the LGBTQIA+ association OGWA (Ook Genks Wel Anders) had to flee, leaving their LGBT flag behind. One of the organizers said that more and more students arrived, and at one point, there were 100 students there.

“They kept yelling, throwing bottles and spitting on the rainbow hearts. We were helped by the teachers on the playground, who supported us until the bell rang. At that point, most of the kids went back to class and calm was restored,” said the unnamed organizer, according to French newspaper Le Figaro.

A video of the incident went viral on social media, which showed the students chanting, “Allah Akbar,” as they crowded the stand.

[...]

Belgium’s Muslim population has propagated extreme violence against gay and lesbian people for years. In 2020, a gang called “Criminal Justice” released numerous videos of their members beating LGBT people and releasing them on Telegram. Participants in the gang called for homosexuals to be slaughtered.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-12T13:22:57+00:00

[Christopher F. Rufo] DEI Swallows Texas A&M: The university has adopted radical politics in order to “dismantle systemic racism.”

The new DEI orthodoxy has been replicated throughout the system, with administrators placing heavy-handed “diversity accountability” requirements on all departments—not only in the humanities but also in hard sciences such as agriculture, engineering, and medicine.

The priorities are both ideological and administrative. A&M’s departments aggressively promote DEI ideology through trainings, programs, lectures, reports, committees, and multimedia, involving hundreds of faculty and staff.

The content of these programs is unadulterated left-wing activism. The School of Dentistry, for example, hosted a guest lecture by University of Texas professor emeritus Robert Jensen, who told the audience that the United States is “appropriately called a white supremacist society.” The School of Veterinary Medicine promoted a “21-Day Anti-Racism Challenge” so that white students could address their “white privilege” and “white fragility.” The College of Geosciences promised to “embed discussion of DEI and anti-racism throughout the undergraduate curriculum.” And within the College of Arts and Science, the sociology department was tasked with implementing a “land acknowledgement statement,” the history department received funding to develop “anti-racist and inclusive pedagogies,” and the English department was asked to develop a “Black Lives Matter special topics course.”

Administratively, the new DEI orthodoxy has resulted in a policy of widespread racial discrimination and segregation. The leadership has made it clear that administrators should pursue “structural diversity,” in which the demographics of the university become “representative of the demographic diversity of the State of Texas.”

To achieve this objective at the faculty level, A&M has created a hiring process that effectively discriminates on the basis of race and sexuality. In its official Handbook for Faculty Search Committee Members, the university has stated that “all members of a search committee should be advocates for diversity” and instructs committees to “take steps that are likely to increase the number of semi-finalists and finalists from groups that are underrepresented in your department,” such as including DEI activists in the hiring process and soliciting DEI statements from potential faculty.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-08T16:44:20+00:00

Ex-England athletics chief banned after saying black athletes are good runners ‘because they have to escape burglaries’

Starkey, 62, was accused of making the comment last November at a Sporting Equals Leadership event.

The subsequent investigation found that he had made the alleged comments after being asked about the drop off in participation rates among ethnically diverse athletes.

He is claimed to have responded: "Usually when athletes start to be more specific in events, most black athletes tend to edge towards sprinting and hurdling … the blacks are all good at running because they have to get away from their burglaries."

The case was brought to a disciplinary panel, who found Starkey to have admitted making the comments - albeit "subject to the caveat that there was a gap between the first sentence and the second sentence".

Starkey claimed to have been facing "mental issues challenges" when he made the comments.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-03T14:22:44+00:00

A CRT Mandate? How the University of California could enshrine critical race theory in the state’s public and private high schools

Every high school student in California is familiar with the “A-G requirements” for admission to the University of California. These requirements codify what almost anyone would list if asked to describe the contents of an academically oriented high school curriculum: two years of history or civics, four years of English, three or four years of math, two or three years of science, two or three years of foreign language, a year of art, and a year of an elective. Or at least that’s the current standard. Depending on how a faculty committee of the University of California rules, beginning in 2030, students applying to the University of California as freshmen would also have to have completed a semester of ethnic studies, taught from a theoretically and politically radical perspective.

Since October 2020, the University of California faculty senate Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (UC BOARS) has been considering a proposal for modifying the entrance requirements from A-G to A-H. The “H” requirement would be one semester of ethnic studies taught concurrently with existing requirements. While that sounds as though high schools could fulfill the requirement by allocating one semester of English to reading the works of, say, Zora Neale Hurston and Amy Tan—or, even more mischievously, by having a semester of social studies based on reading Wesley Yang and John McWhorter—these approaches would not count as ethnic studies, since the proposed requirement mandates not only a substantive focus on ethnically diverse populations but also a specific theoretical and political approach.

The November 5, 2021, UC BOARS memo has to be read in full to appreciate it fully, but its essence is to require a highly contentious approach often referred to as critical race theory (a term that does not appear in the memo, though two of the memos’ authors have “critical race” in their job titles). The memo requires that qualifying high school courses would have to emphasize antiracism and antiracist solidarity. “Claims of objectivity” are to be critically examined and indigenous epistemologies cultivated.

Other requirements mandate more mainstream social-scientific concepts, such as understanding how race is socially constructed, but it is debatable whether that concept is important enough to be a prerequisite for college education, and it is extremely dubious to expect that the perspective implied by the rest of the memo would give this question the nuance that it deserves. The guidelines also require that courses include land acknowledgments, “honor anti-colonial and liberatory movements” locally and globally, associate “present-day ideologies” with imperialism and genocide, and engage in antiracist practice. That is, in order to enter the University of California (where I am a professor), high school students would had to have taken the kind of polemical course or courses that just a few years ago most faculty would have been embarrassed to see offered at the university level as an elective.

The University of California proposal would, in effect, set the curriculum for every high school in California. The California state legislature already mandates ethnic studies for public high schools, but the UC BOARS proposal goes beyond that. (The original version of the state legislature bill had CRT language, as well as support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel, but Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed it on those grounds.) The UC BOARS proposal would effectively mandate this curriculum for private schools as well as public ones. Organizations generally follow the imperatives and hints offered by their cultural and professional environment, and the most relevant actors for private schools are colleges—in particular, college-admissions departments. A California private high school would no sooner offer a curriculum that violated the University of California’s admissions requirements than an aerospace company would manufacture fighter jets that violate federal procurement guidelines or a stockyard would grow beef contrary to McDonald’s standards. If a California parent in the next decade is dissatisfied with the woke curriculum offered in public schools, he would no longer have the option to exit to a private school, unless he finds the rare one willing to forgo sending graduates to colleges in the state university system.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-05-01T14:30:14+00:00

Schools Are Ditching Homework, Deadlines in Favor of ‘Equitable Grading’

In Las Vegas, some teachers and students say the changes have led to gaming the system and a lack of accountability.

“If you go to a job in real life, you can’t pick and choose what tasks you want to do and only do the quote big ones,” said Alyson Henderson, a high-school English teacher there. Lessons drag on now, she said, because students can turn in work until right before grades are due.

“We’re really setting students up for a false sense of reality,” Ms. Henderson said.

Equitable grading still typically awards As through Fs, but the criteria are overhauled. Homework, in-class discussions and other practice work, called formative assessments, are weighted at between 10% and 30%. The bulk of a grade is earned through what are known as summative assessments, such as tests or essays.

Extra credit is banned—no more points for bringing in school supplies—as is grading for behavior, which includes habits such as attendance.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-04-28T10:34:55+00:00

HBCUs overwhelmingly lack DEI departments, research shows

Amid the push by prominent Democrats and many in academia for the expansion of diversity, equity and inclusion departments in colleges and universities, research shows that the vast majority of historically black colleges and universities do not have them.

Of the 80 HBCUs that The College Fix researched, just 16 have an official DEI department. While many more of those HBCUs have put out statements endorsing DEI initiatives, the vast majority have not established such departments, unlike other prominent universities in their respective states.

It’s “a curious feature of America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) that they rarely have any diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) administrators or policies on their campuses, beyond what federal law requires,” Boise State University professor and Claremont Institute fellow Scott Yenor argued in an April 12 piece in City Journal.

“Given the importance of diversity to excellence (as we are told), it would seem like HBCUs are suffering badly from a critical lack of it. But HBCUs do not act like they lack diversity, equity, or inclusion, or that they need to act rapidly to make their campuses ‘look like America.’ Quite the contrary,” Yenor wrote.

The Fix’s research found Florida A&M University, a historically black university in Tallahassee, has a statement touting “diversity and inclusion” on its website, but no DEI department. However, mainstream institutions such as Florida State University and Florida International University have offices devoted to DEI on campus.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-04-27T17:40:49+00:00

School Board cuts music class over ‘white supremacy,’ ‘institutional violence’

School Board Director Scott Clifthorne told concerned parents that music courses aren’t offered equitably across the district. He said some schools provide the courses at times that would require some students to miss “core instruction,” whereas others don’t. Rather than address this reasonable concern, he launched into a monologue to claim music classes are examples of “white supremacy” culture.

“We also know that there are other folks in the community that experience things like a tradition of excellence as exclusionary. And I don’t think that there are just one or two or 10 or 20 people that think that. But that’s not unique to elementary instrumental music. We’re a school district that lives in … is entrenched in … is surrounded by white supremacy culture. And that’s a real thing,” Clifthorne said.

Clifthorne explained that string and wind instrumental music isn’t “intrinsically white supremacist.” But in the next sentence, he said it is, in fact, “white supremacist.”

“There’s nothing about strings or wind instrumental music that is intrinsically white supremacist. However, the ways in which it is and the ways in which all of our institutions, not just schools — local government, state government, churches, or neighborhoods — inculcate and allow white supremacy culture to continue to be propagated and cause significant institutional violence are things that we have to think about carefully as a community. And I think that we have to do that interrogation. And we have to address the ways in which it creates challenges for administering the educational day for our elementary learners while we retain the program,” he said.

What does any of this mean beyond stringing together progressive buzzwords and phrases? Clifthorne did not respond to two requests for comment.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-04-24T15:51:55+00:00

Germany’s green energy delusion has an enormous environmental and economic price tag

For a long time, nuclear energy has been one of the most divisive areas of energy policy in the EU’s supply. The technology offers stable energy supplies and has positive environmental and economic indicators, but the radical Green parties of Europe have worked hard to convince many that these plants should be closed.

This has been achieved mainly in Germany and Austria. Downsizing has begun and further investment has become impossible. Reality, however, has shown that this ideology-driven energy policy comes at a heavy price. It was not by chance that energy policy expert Oliver Hortay recently recalled an estimate by a Berkeley University researcher that the social cost of German nuclear plant closures had already reached $12 billion a year.

The threat of energy shortages in Europe has led to a change in the perception of nuclear power among EU citizens. In Germany, for example, the percentage of people who oppose nuclear power has fallen from 65 to 20 percent. But it seems that the will of the electorate does not matter.

[...]

It is hard to talk about a green transition when carbon emissions are rising. The huge expansion of solar and wind capacity in Germany is no guarantee of security of supply. The country is increasingly using coal instead of Russian gas. In fact, mines that had previously been closed down have had to be reopened, and a German energy company has even started to dismantle a wind farm to allow for the expansion of a neighboring coal mine.

[...]

The Greens went after gas boilers, too. They will now be banned in German homes from 2024. Greens say they cannot meet their climate commitments otherwise. However, it is coal-fired power stations, not residential gas boilers, that threaten climate targets.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-04-22T20:22:07+00:00

Netflix Sued for Depicting Cleopatra as Black

An Egyptian lawyer on Sunday filed a lawsuit over Netflix's upcoming Queen Cleopatra, accusing the streaming service of "erasing the Egyptian identity" for depicting the ruler as a Black woman.

Mahmoud al-Semary submitted the legal complaint with Egypt's public prosecutor following the recent release of a trailer for the docudrama series, which premieres May 10. His filing not only requested legal action be taken against the makers of the show but for Netflix to be shut down in Egypt.

"Most of what Netflix platform displays do not conform to Islamic and societal values and principles, especially Egyptian ones," Mahmoud al-Semary said in his complaint, according to the Egypt Independent.

Adele James, a British actress who is of mixed race, stars as the queen in the upcoming Netflix production. Jada Pinkett Smith serves as executive producer of the series, and she is quoted in promotional material from Netflix as saying, "We don't often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories because there are tons of them!"

However, many historians and experts on ancient Egypt disagree with Pinkett Smith, instead saying Cleopatra was of Macedonian heritage and likely fair-skinned. But not everyone shares this view. Other scholars have argued that the monarch may have had additional ancestries, and her complexion may have not been fair.

WickedWitchOfTheWest · 2023-04-19T14:39:05+00:00

Illinois state senator defends Chicago teens' rioting, looting: 'It's a mass protest'

An Illinois state senator defended the Chicago "Teen Takeover" that unfolded Saturday night and left multiple boys shot, claiming it was simply "a mass protest against poverty and segregation."

Robert Peters, who represents parts of Chicago, responded to the chaotic scene that saw hundreds of local youth smashing car windows, jumping on surrounding vehicles, and firing guns in the streets.

Rather than condemn the chaos that left tourists running in fear, Peters suggested it was a "mass protest."

"Since I’m a glutton for punishment and I’m sure I’m gonna get the most unhinged, crime weirdo replies but: I would look at the behavior of young people as a political act and statement," Peters wrote in a Twitter post Sunday. "It’s a mass protest against poverty and segregation. Rest in peace to my mentions."

Hundreds of police officers were called to the scene, arresting nine adults and six juveniles in connection to the riot.

According to Fox 32, a man was taken to the hospital after being beaten by a group of teenagers after they jumped on and smashed his windshield while he and his wife sat inside.

All discussion of it on the local subreddit was quickly jannied, naturally.

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