Twerkin’ Tiara, Democratic SuperstarBy Rod Dreher
July 7, 2022
Powerful piece on Bari Weiss’s Substack today, from Prof. Joseph Manson, a UCLA anthropologist who has retired rather than gut it out in a department that has been overtaken by woke radicals. Excerpts:
Gradually, one hire at a time, practitioners of “critical” (i.e. leftist, postmodernist) anthropology, some of them lying about their beliefs during job interviews, came to comprise the department’s most influential clique. These militant faculty members recruited even more militant graduate students to work with them.
I can’t recount here even a representative sample of this faction’s penchant for mendacity and intimidation, because most of it occurred during confidential discussions, usually about hiring and promotion decisions. But I can describe their public torment and humiliation of one of my colleagues, P. Jeffrey Brantingham.
Jeff had developed simulation models of the geographic and temporal patterning of urban crime, and had created predictive software that he marketed to law enforcement agencies. In Spring 2018, the department’s Anthropology Graduate Students Association passed a resolution accusing Jeff’s research of, among other counter-revolutionary sins, “entrench[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the criminalization of Blackness in the United States” and calling for “referring” his research to UCLA’s Vice Chancellor for Research, presumably for some sort of investigation. This document contained no trace of scholarly argument, but instead resembled a religious proclamation of anathema.
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Read it all. What this mob — with the full collaboration of the UCLA department’s leadership — did to Prof. Brantingham is unconscionable. If California were led by sane and responsible people, there would be legislative hearings into the collapse of professional standards in state universities. But of course that is not California. And I would imagine California is very far from alone in that. State legislatures around the country are going to have to take up the reform of universities, to return them to professional standards. The universities are going to scream bloody murder, but it’s the only way to save them from themselves.
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About what Prof. Manson’s anthropology colleagues did to their fellow professor for having the nerve to point to politically inconvenient facts about crime, consider this news from Chicago:
There are no crowdsourced charity drives raising millions for victims’ families in Chicago, where the holiday weekend death toll reached at least 10 with 62 injured — numbers that exceed the toll in Monday’s mass shooting at a July Fourth parade in nearby Highland Park, Ill. In that affluent lakeside suburb, the violence was an anomaly. Here, it is a grimly regular occurrence.
“They have a lot of resources there in Highland Park,” said Bobbie Brown, 62, who watched the nationally televised law enforcement response and community outpouring from her home in the Englewood neighborhood, down the block from where the homicide near the playground happened Friday afternoon. “Ain’t that something? Our babies see people get shot while they’re at a playground, and there’s no counseling. They have to suck it up and deal with it.”
Granted, there’s a meaningful difference between a lunatic shooting up a parade, deliberately targeting innocents, and drug dealers and gangbangers shooting each other, with innocents as collateral damage. But really, if you’re dead, you’re dead, no matter what the motivation of the shooter. The academic Left perversely only cares about the issue for the sake of weaponizing it against Whiteness.
Meanwhile:
https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1544841399224369152* * *
Don’t expect the Democratic Party to fix it. Here’s one of their up-and-comers, Tiara Mack, an Ivy League graduate, queer black woman, and Rhode Island state senator:
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1544131356526948352I’m not the first one to say this, but is there any more apt symbol of the Democratic Party in the Year of Our Lord 2022 than a queer, BIPOC Ivy League graduate with her head in the sand and her fat butt jiggling in the air? I ask you. * * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/twerking-tiara-democratic-superstar-clown-world/
