Americans have finally woken up to the great university scandal

Americans have finally woken up to the great university scandal
Colleges and other higher education institutions are churning out embittered, over-educated failures, indoctrinated in Left-wing ideology 

Americans are disillusioned with higher education. In only 15 years, from 2010 to 2025, the share of respondents to Gallup polls who say that a university education today is “very important” has plummeted from 75 per cent to 35 per cent.

Growing scepticism about the benefits of a college or university education is warranted. Between 1990 and 2022, the share of Americans aged over 25 with college diplomas nearly doubled, rising from 21 per cent to 38 per cent.

While college or university graduates still earn more than those without degrees, the graduate surplus has produced underemployment for many degree holders, defined as employment in jobs that do not require a college education. According to a 2024 report by the Burning Glass Institute and the Strada Institute for the Future of Work, 52 per cent of college graduates in Generation Z were working in jobs that did not require a college diploma and 75 per cent of that group remained in the trap for a decade after their graduation ceremony.

It comes as no surprise that underemployment is high among workers with degrees in liberal arts (56.5 per cent) and anthropology (55.9 per cent) and low among those with degrees in nursing (9.7 per cent) and computer science (16.5 per cent).

Far from warning students of the difficulty of finding jobs with particular degrees, however, universities are glad to take their money while dooming them to failure and bitterness in the future.

The oversupply of college graduates has enabled employers to demand degrees for jobs that did not need them in the past. For example, the proportion of secretaries with college degrees nearly quadrupled between 1990 and 2021, from 9 per cent to 33 per cent. In 2017, a Harvard Business School study showed that, even though only 16 per cent of production supervisors had college degrees, 67 per cent of job postings for new hires required one.

Many employers are apparently using a college degree as a filter in whittling down the applicant pool. The degree itself may be irrelevant to the job, but it demonstrates that the graduate can complete tasks and show up on time. But given the expenditure of years and money necessary to obtain it, it is a very expensive certificate of punctuality.

In light of the diminishing gains from higher education, the question that needs to be asked is this: should universities in their present form continue to exist at all?

Today’s bloated “multiversity” is a grotesque conglomerate, an institutional black hole that has absorbed ever more previously-independent institutions over the last century and a half.

In the 19th century, Harvard Law School was forced to lower its entrance requirements, in order to compete with alternatives like independent law schools and apprenticeships with attorneys. In the 1900s, 48 per cent of lawyers and doctors still attended independent professional schools. By the mid-20th century, the university blob had not only absorbed law and medicine into its swelling protoplasm but had also devoured formerly-independent artistic training institutions, like ateliers and musical conservatories.

Meanwhile, the increasingly-professionalised natural sciences moved onto campus. Following the collapse of ambitious 19th-century attempts to create a unifying science of society, like those of Comte, Marx, and Bentham, specialised fragmentary “social science” disciplines like economics, political science, and psychology were welcomed by the expanding university empire – even though nobody can really explain how sociology differs from anthropology, or why, in American universities, political philosophy is in the political science department, not the philosophy department.

After the Second World War, so-called “creative writing” programmes sprang up at universities, producing those sad and ludicrous figures, professor-novelists and professor-poets, whose work nobody reads. Then, in the 1970s, former Sixties radicals won the right to their own Left-wing Agitprop programmes on campus – black studies, Hispanic studies, women’s studies, gender studies. Via the human resources departments at big employers and the “diversity training” they supervised, otherwise-unemployable graduates of campus identity-politics programmes disseminated woke concepts and phrases like “LatinX” and “birthing person” to captive audiences of workers and managers.

The need to coordinate all of these unrelated schools and departments has been used as an excuse by empire-building university leaders for a massive expansion of centralised university administration. Premodern liberal arts colleges were run on shoestring budgets by the faculty themselves. But even medium and small colleges today are Kafkaesque bureaucracies.

Unified from above by ever-thickening layers of meddling bureaucrats, universities have been unified from within by political and ideological conformity. While the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the US has remained roughly the same over the last generation, Republicans have become nearly extinct in the professoriate. At Yale, where I obtained a master’s degree and worked as a teaching assistant in the 1980s, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among the faculty was recently estimated to be 28 to 1. A 2024 survey of 37 departments across seven universities found that 72 per cent of faculty members were Democrats and only 6.7 per cent Republicans.

College graduates may leave campus with few skills that are useful in their future jobs, but they will have been indoctrinated for years in progressive ideology by almost-exclusively Democratic professors and administrators. Ironically, the Democratic Party itself is the greatest victim of the glut of woke college grads. In 2020, for the first time, white Democrats with college degrees outnumbered those without, turning the party into a strange-bedfellow coalition of college-educated whites and mostly-non-college-educated non-white Americans.

The result was the Biden administration, which tilted so far to the Left that it alienated enough minority voters as well as working-class white voters to give Republicans control of all three branches in 2024.

Notwithstanding the progressive virtue-signalling of university faculty and administrators, the American university as an employer engages in Dickensian employment practices as bad as those of the sleaziest low-wage meat-packing or chicken-plucking firm. While American universities are richer than ever – Harvard has been called a hedge fund with a university attached – many are slashing labour costs by phasing out tenured professors in favour of poorly-paid adjuncts with very little job security. Today half of American undergraduates are taught by adjuncts, who make up 70 per cent of university faculty.

Meanwhile, universities are milking cash cows in the form of academic programmes that lead to visas and citizenship for foreign students, who can then bring in their relatives. The university can charge full tuition to the rich parents of foreign students; in return, whole clans can become eligible for chain migration through family unification, once the student has obtained citizenship. The losers are the voters whose representatives shower universities with tax privileges on the promise that they will educate the country’s own citizens, not rich foreign ruling classes.

Because selfish, money-hungry, empire-building universities will not reform themselves from within, government will have to reform them from without. In the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed by Congress recently, Section 84001 requires that federal aid be cut for degree programmes in which most graduates earn less than a median high-school graduate.

Politicians of both parties are interested in apprenticeships and other alternatives to a four-year undergraduate education. Employers, too, can play their part by dropping degree requirements for jobs that do not need them. But much more radical steps need to be taken. Universities need to be broken up.

Natural science and engineering faculties should be spun off as independent research institutes with their own educational and apprenticeship programmes. So should trade schools. It should be possible to graduate from high school and go directly to law or medical school, without wasting four years obtaining a bachelor’s degree.

According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics, most jobs in the US require only a high school diploma and perhaps some on-the-job training. For most people, apprenticeships or skill certificate programmes should replace the quest for useless college degrees.

Literature and the arts flourished for millennia, thanks to commercial sales or aristocratic patronage, and can flourish again, once university “creative writing” programmes are defunded and shut down and “writers in residence” on campus are compelled to reside somewhere else. Left-wing race and gender radicals can plot the overthrow of capitalism and the patriarchy in cafes and bohemian neighbourhoods, as in the old days.

Empirical, non-partisan studies of the economy and politics are valuable. But mathematical neoclassical economics is a pseudoscience like sociology and anthropology. Bogus social science disciplines that are only a few generations old deserve to go the way of alchemy and astrology.

The scandal of higher education can no longer be ignored. College graduates in the US and in some other countries are underemployed and overeducated. The next generation can benefit from reforms that minimise the link between college credentials and jobs. And society as a whole can benefit by liberating resources and talent that are trapped inside the sclerotic and overgrown higher education sector.

 

Profs call out their association for left-wing mayhem

Terry Newman: Profs call out their association for left-wing mayhem

"Some Canadian academics are accusing the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) of straying from its core mission of advocating for academic rights and fair working conditions to pursue a politicized agenda that undermines its fundamental purpose. Specifically, they accuse CAUT of betraying its founding principles by issuing an unsubstantiated U.S. travel advisory, producing a likely skewed academic freedom report with soon-to-be added anti-Israel rhetoric, and encouraging administrative overreach into equity-based hiring that risks faculty autonomy...

CAUT’s scope has, indeed, gone far beyond its original purposes.

Founded in 1951, CAUT was envisioned as a national association that might help faculty members with issues related to “salaries and pensions, sabbatical leave and academic freedom” — basic, bread and butter concerns for its members who now total 75,000 teachers, librarians, researchers, and other academic staff in over 130 Canadian colleges and universities across the country.

Over time, CAUT’s role expanded to include other, non-controversial issues, such as the protection of intellectual property, necessary for the digital age, advice on legal support and collective bargaining, and fair employment, which includes organizing against the increasingly precarious conditions of contract workers. 

Fast forward to 2025. CAUT’s scope is now far more ambitious, political and global.

In its own words, CAUT sees itself as advancing “equity and human rights for academic staff across Canada,” but not just in this country. Despite originally being an organization concerned with the basics of labour for academic employees here at home, CAUT now sees its role as global, telling members, “We partner with national and international allies to defend human rights.”

It appears CAUT wants to be part of an academic United Nations.

In addition to these, no doubt, well-meaning, yet, lofty goals, CAUT now sees organizing to push for equity hires as part of its purview. “With our member associations and allies, we press for the Indigenization of our colleges and universities and justice for all,” it notes...

While taking no issue with fairness in pay amongst genders, “two individuals who have different genders but comparable positions, experience, accomplishments,” the letter argues that advocating for targeted equity hires goes beyond the scope of CAUT’s mandate and actually promotes administrative control over hiring, conflicting with CAUT’s role in preventing administrative overreach, as hires are typically decided amongst faculty members, not university administrators, because doing so would threaten academic freedom. 

Campaigns like these — targeting hires from particular identity groups — are arguably in opposition to fairness for all existing and prospective members, including those in minority groups who, even as the best candidate for the job, may end up feeling like a token diversity hire.

Other concerns outlined in the open letter include an April 15 CAUT statement advising academics against non-essential travel to the United States. As pointed out in the letter, the statement went far beyond the updates made to the Canadian government’s own travel advisory page, which advised Canadians at the time to take “normal security precautions” and simply reiterated already existing travel norms concerning border screening and the discretion individual border agents have in making decisions.

CAUT behaved as if it were an association responsible for something between Canada’s travel advisory and national terrorism threat websites...

“CAUT provided no data with which to substantiate this claim, has no special expertise in security or Canada-U.S. relations, to their knowledge, and, has not cautioned against travelling to any countries other than the U.S. — even though many other countries (including Canada) also allow comprehensive border searches.”

The letter notes that: “CAUT has not issued any sort of travel advisory for the 100+ countries that the Government of Canada lists as higher risk for travellers, including several with significant authoritarian policies that threaten faculty members’ academic freedom (arguably to a much greater extent than those of the current U.S. government). CAUT’s advisory therefore gives the appearance of being primarily an anti-Trump political statement rather than a reasoned recommendation to protect the rights of faculty members.”

For example, there doesn’t appear to have ever been a travel warning from CAUT for Iran, even though Iranian-Canadian anthropology professor Hooma Hoodfar was arrested by authorities there in 2016 while on a personal and research visit.

Hoodfar was detained in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for 112 days without medicine for the rare neurological disease she suffers from. Iran’s press reported that she was charged with “collaborating with a hostile government against national security and with propaganda against the state” with the prosecutor there accusing her of “dabbling in feminism.” Hoodfar researched sexuality and gender in Islam at the time.

While CAUT actively campaigned for Hoodfar’s release, they did not issue a travel advisory for Iran at that time, or afterward, to protect academics.

The letter further accuses CAUT of engaging in political advocacy rather than objectively studying post-October 7 academic freedom on campuses.

It claims that CAUT’s March 2025 “Report on Academic Freedom in Canada after October 7, 2023.” focused “almost exclusively on alleged incidents of suppression of pro-Palestinian viewpoints” in its compiling of cases that occurred from Oct. 7, 2023 to March 2025. While CAUT admits the report is not exhaustive, reading it would lead readers to believe that pro-Israeli voices are largely unsuppressed as the report contains only three examples of such suppression over that period.

The letter claims the report is methodologically unsound, as its non-random sampling relied on cases which were widely reported or brought to the attention of CAUT. One disadvantage of non-random sampling is that it often systematically excludes key subpopulations, in this case, pro-Israel voices.

CAUT stated that it did not attempt to investigate or determine the merits of the cases it lists in its report, yet contradicts itself by weighing in on the case of Université de Montréal (UdeM) lecturer Yanise Arab who was suspended after being caught in a video yelling, “Go back to Poland” at Concordia University students. CAUT claims the audio is “unclear,” and they conveniently omit the word he uttered following that: “sharmuta” which means “whore.”

As if this weren’t bad enough, CAUT members voted on May 2, 2025 to amend this report by adding what the letter refers to as “blatantly anti-Israel language” including the “war waged by Israel on Gaza, now widely considered genocidal in both intent and practice” as “context” to the earlier report. 

This all doesn’t sit well with Rachel Altman, an associate professor of statistics and actuarial science at Simon Fraser University in B.C., who has no choice but to be associated with CAUT because her union is. She told me in an email, “Some of us (myself included) are legally mandated to be members of our bargaining associations — which then use our dues, in part, to pay for membership in CAUT. It’s outrageous that I and others are being forced to support an association whose activities are inconsistent with its purposes — especially when those activities are contrary to our interests.”...

[The letter] recommends that CAUT adopt an “institutional voice,” as per Harvard, where it’s already been recognized that “universities and their leaders should not issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” According to Altman, several Canadian universities, including Laurentian University, University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, University of Waterloo, and University of New Brunswick, have already adopted similar policies."

 

The left wing agenda is shoved into everything

Left wingers love unions because they can hijack them to push their agenda 

The Economics of Political Correctness

The Economics of Political Correctness - WSJ

One morning, chatting with Harvard undergraduates just before my class, I reminisced about my own college years in the late 1990s—debating religion in our residence hall or arguing about the role of discrimination in America in common rooms.

Those conversations were uncomfortable and even heated at times. But they were positive experiences for me and I’m pretty sure everyone else. Grappling with different views helped us understand one another, and that helped me understand, and sometimes change, my own outlook.

I asked a student in the front row: With all this technology and social media, where do you have these types of conversations? She looked up from her turquoise notebook and replied: “We don’t.” I looked around the amphitheater and asked, “Really?” A hundred heads nodded in unison.

I thought they were exaggerating until a student in another class dared to ask if racial disparities are due to systemic racism or differences in work ethic. He happens to be black and from a disadvantaged background, and he earnestly wondered why, in his neighborhood growing up, it seemed to him that black immigrants worked harder than American-born blacks. A white woman a couple of rows behind him called him a “white supremacist.”

If my dorm-mates and I had the threat of academic censure hanging over our heads back then, would we have been as forthcoming with each other? I’d like to think so, but I doubt it. We weren’t courageous; we lived in a world where the cost of information was higher and the cost of asking the “wrong” question was essentially zero, so debate was an efficient way to learn.

In my college dorm’s common room, I met an Indian woman who thought arranged marriage made more sense than dating. I found her arguments baffling for the obvious reasons—and besides, economists typically think more choice leads to better outcomes. She didn’t question my motives for asking; she simply pulled out data on divorce rates across the two continents to prove her point. That common room was the first place I debated chapters of the Bible with an atheist. The first time I had a chance to ask delicate questions of a gay man about his experiences.

A decade ago, I still interacted with dozens of undergraduates and doctoral students who were asking important and provocative questions about race and sex in America. But now students invite me to lunch and ask if their research idea is too risky; they wonder out loud what they are allowed to “say in public,” as though they are in the situation room discussing nuclear launch strategy rather than pondering the economics of policing in an overpriced cafe.

Some are turning to an app called Sidechat, where they can frankly debate others in the Harvard community without revealing their names. It’s good that these conversations are happening somewhere; it’s distressing that they require a veil of anonymity.

The issue affects research in economics, hardly known for its far-left politics. When I used artificial intelligence to evaluate all the race- and sex-related papers published in the top six econ journals since 2006, asking the algorithm to score how liberal or conservative the conclusions leaned, I found a more than 2-to-1 leftward tilt overall.

There were particularly big gaps in the late Obama years and the early 2020s. Did empirical output lean particularly to the left at those times, or were political-correctness pressures especially strong?

Realistically, either journal editors are refusing to publish controversial results, or academics are too cowardly even to do the research. One notable exception—a recent American Economic Review paper finding that children’s academic outcomes improve when parents are incarcerated—met with censorious derision from others in the field on social media. My own work on race and policing, which was published in a top peer-reviewed journal in economics, was labeled “hate speech” by (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter.

Even if stone cold economists have fallen prey to self-censorship, economics can tell us why. A brilliant analysis by Stephen Morris—a formalization of early ideas developed by Glenn Loury—develops the basic economics of political correctness. Here is an example:

Suppose there is an informed professor advising a less informed politician as to whether diversity, equity, and inclusion policies help minorities. If the professor says DEI is harmful, the politician might interpret the recommendation as the honest findings of an unbiased researcher. But he also might interpret it as the motivated reasoning of a racist, and might even stop asking the professor for advice.

Mr. Morris demonstrates mathematically that if the professor is sufficiently concerned about being thought a racist, he will lie and recommend DEI even when he knows it’s a bad idea for minorities. And if he does tell the truth, his advice may come across as tainted by bias. The implications are unsettling for anyone trying to make decisions based on academics’ recommendations.

A similar dynamic is at play on any socially sensitive topic, and social media turbocharges it. Online activists have major incentives to call out even obscure academic work they deem beyond the pale; doing so can help them shore up their own progressive bona fides and build their followings. And there are few penalties for misconstruing the target’s argument or being plain wrong.

The question is what can be done. First, we need to take a careful look at how we hire and promote faculty. Instead of having them sign statements swearing fealty to DEI, perhaps they should promise to tell the truth. Second, we need high-powered incentives for people who are correct regardless of politics. If someone scientifically demonstrates that systemic racism is the main factor in racial disparities in America, this should be celebrated. If someone finds that health disparities are driven by genetics rather than social factors—that too should be celebrated. We need something like the MacArthur Fellowship or the X Prize for telling the truth about data.

I am gravely concerned about the rise of political correctness on college campuses, its effect on the type of analysis that is being published and being taught, and how this will undermine, among many other things, efforts to help the marginalized in America. Such efforts will succeed only if they are rooted in the truth.

 

Taking on “Repressive Tolerance” at Canada’s Universities

From 2021:

Taking on “Repressive Tolerance” at Canada’s Universities

"After a Concordia University professor apologized for quoting the offensive title of a well-known political tract during a classroom discussion, Premier François Legault promised he would take action to protect free speech rights on la belle province’s campuses. In a February 13 Facebook post, Legault claimed that “more and more people are feeling intimidated” by radical activists “trying to censor certain words.” The scope for free speech was shrinking on campus and in Quebec society, the Coalition Avenir Québec Premier warned. He also called for better protection for victims of racism and for people who are bullied when they present facts and ideas.

Legault is following in the footsteps of the Ford and Kenney governments which, over the past two years, have forced their universities and colleges to adopt new campus free speech policies...

In 2010, American political provocateuse Ann Coulter cancelled a campus speech after a University of Ottawa vice-president warned her to watch her words. Pro-life students are often harassed by student associations and campus administrators. Professors and senior administrators have been hounded out of their jobs or come under intense pressure for expressing heterodox views on anything from race relations to climate change.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) has amassed an impressive record in its court challenges to campus free speech oppression. It also compiles an annual Campus Freedom Index that gives each university a grade on its free speech policies and practices. When Ford issued his campus free speech policy, JCCF President John Carpay praised it: “It is a huge step forward for Ontario to require that universities incorporate into their own policies the University of Chicago Statement on Principles of Free Expression.”

HEQCO, the Ontario watchdog, has so far issued two annual reports on the issue, and if we take them at face value, the free speech problem has virtually disappeared from the province’s campuses. Its colleges and universities mount tens of thousands of public events each year.  According to the HEQCO, they have received only a handful of complaints about free speech issues, and all have been easily resolved. But is it plausible to think that Ontario is immune to North American cancel culture and campus illiberalism? Did a simple ministerial order fix the free speech problem so easily?

Of course not. The threat to campus free speech is just as big a problem as we thought when Ford issued his policy. Ontario’s pro-life students report that they are still harassed when they speak out. Toronto-based pro-life advocate Blaise Alleyne reports that he and colleagues have even been physically assaulted for their displays at Ontario campuses. Ontario academic Debra Soh says she had to abandon her university career in sex research in order to continue speaking and writing freely about issues of gender. Jordan Peterson, a well-known refugee from the constrained atmosphere of Ontario campus life, is still on leave from the University of Toronto, while Cambridge University recently rescinded Peterson’s fellowship on that campus...

When a political movement has the upper hand in a society, it never sees the free speech problems it generates. The tyranny of the majority afflicts the minority. On campus, free speech problems are essentially invisible to the progressive majority. It could be a measure of what we might call “progressives’ privilege” that they find it so easy to dismiss campus free speech as a fake issue invented by right-wingers.

In reality, problems with free speech – that is to say, the limitations upon or entire absence of it – are better perceived by those in the minority. And on North American campuses, that minority might once have been conservative professors and students. But as illiberalism spreads it tentacles, free speech is becoming a problem for more and more non-conservatives, including apolitical scientists like Debra Soh.  A recently released poll by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology of 40,000 academics in numerous fields across North America found that 70 percent of respondents who self-identified as right-leaning or conservative perceived a “hostile” work environment due to their political beliefs. Remarkably, 12 percent of the survey respondents admitted to discriminating against paper submissions and promotion applications they received from conservative academics...

According to Debra Soh’s cri de couer for freer inquiry into basic science, even tenured professors feel they cannot openly report research findings on gender and gender identity. As Soh wrote in the above-linked book, The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society, the closing of the gender identity clinic at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in December 2016 showed sex researchers how easily they can lose access to labs, research opportunities and jobs if they express unfashionable views in the free-fire zone of North America’s culture wars.

The power structure on campus can make self-reporting even harder. Campus policies on diversity, inclusion and equity can easily be administered in ways that oppress free speech. When that happens, only a handful of victims will have the courage to self-report the problem. University professors have tenure and that should protect their academic freedom, but tenure didn’t help my University of Calgary colleague and friend Tom Flanagan...

When McMaster University in Hamilton recently advertised for a dozen faculty positions that are only open to candidates of a certain race, no one on campus spoke up to condemn this blatant act of discrimination. Who would?...

Quoting Mill as if he is the end of the debate on free speech leads to certain defeat in the contemporary campus environment. Campus illiberals reject Mill in favour of Herbert Marcuse, a leading light of the 1960s “New Left”. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse took dead aim at Mill’s argument. Even Mill, Marcuse noted, recognized that liberty can only be enjoyed as a social good by those who are “in the maturity of their faculties”. Liberty is not suitable for children or barbarians. Liberty only works in societies where free citizens are “capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.” And while Mill was certain that his nation had “long since” reached this point (as he wrote in pp 18-19 of On Liberty), Marcuse was not so sure. 

“The function and value of tolerance,” Marcuse argued, “depend on the equality prevalent in the society in which tolerance is practiced.” Since capitalist societies are shot through with profound inequality and the – in Marcuse’s view – widespread ignorance, propaganda and social structures needed to perpetuate inequality, Marcuse called for replacing Mill’s regime of “pure” tolerance with a “liberating tolerance” that would mean “intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.” That would involve withdrawing tolerance from “regressive movements before they can become active; intolerance even toward thought, opinion, and word, and finally, intolerance in the opposite direction, that is, toward the self-styled conservatives, to the political Right.”

The Mill-Marcuse argument about liberty leads us to a deeper argument about the purpose of education. Is it the role of higher education to lead students through the contending arguments of our society’s traditions towards an appreciation of truth, beauty and justice? Or is the “educational enterprise” one of “counter-education”, to use Marcuse’s term, “the systematic withdrawal of tolerance toward regressive and repressive opinions and movements”?

Put another way, is education really about pursuing knowledge, or is it just the exercise of power in pursuit of a political agenda – albeit often cloaked in wordy intellectualism? Mill’s side is humble. Free speech advocates do not assume that any one group, no matter how enlightened, can be trusted to determine what is true and what is not. Marcuse’s side is arrogant. It assumes that one side has a monopoly on truth and right but, once the radicals have cleansed society of regressive structures and opinions, they will readily give up that power to police speech, debate and thought in favour of letting a thousand flowers bloom.

The North American mania for ever-newer forms of social justice has given campus administrators and many professors new reasons to adopt Marcuse’s thinking...

Marcuse’s repressive tolerance also shows us that political leaders who want to “impose” free speech on campuses are playing a losing game. After all, political careers are short and academic careers are long. A few politically appointed university governors may pretend to knuckle under to their political superiors on the campus free-speech issue, but leaving the illiberal argument of repressive tolerance unmet means the illiberals will win out as soon as the political winds shift direction. The only way for the friends of free speech to prevail on campus is by sidestepping the power game of “imposing” and taking Mill a bit more seriously...

Newcomers to university boards are often shocked at how little influence they and the institution’s leaders can exert over the research and teaching done on campus.

Premiers, ministers or political staff who think that a simple directive from Queen’s Park or Quebec City’s Colline parlementaire will fix the campus free speech problem are vastly overestimating their power and misapprehending how things work in those institutions. It is foolish to pretend that a board of governors with only a thin connection to an institution’s academic policies can enforce the “Chicago Principles”, given the decentralized nature of campus decision-making, the internal political skills of legions of academic administrators and over the objections of most academics and student groups. Changing campus life requires a bit more respect for academic ways...

Even Marcuse conceded that repressive tolerance has limits. A broader-scope tolerance, he wrote, “Is justified in harmless debates, in conversation, in academic discussion; [and] it is indispensable in the scientific enterprise…” Insisting that academic communities confront that caveat to Marcuse’s argument is the beginning of rolling back campus oppression."

 

Left wingers love to misquote Popper, claiming that his Paradox of Tolerance means they not just can but need to censor those they disagree with, but really they are channeling Marcuse instead.

Queer Theory Primer

On the nihilism of Queer Theory and why schools keep trying to indoctrinate children:

Okay so this is going to be this talk is going to be a bit dark and I apologize ahead of time, but often times we need to traverse the darkness to find the light and to find Grace, so, again I'm sorry we've got to get dark but that's just the state of things today.

5 minutes ago, gender identity did not exist. 5 minutes ago, schools were not socially transitioning children without their parents' knowledge or consent. 5 minutes ago, your sex was observed at birth. It was not assigned. 5 minutes ago, drag queens were not in schools reading wholly inappropriate books to children as young as three, four and five in school classrooms, lunchrooms, libraries and gymnasiums.

This one's dark. Five minutes ago, perfectly healthy 13-year-old girls were not seeking out *elective* double mastectomy procedures as part of a gender affirmative care plan that promises to make them whole, that promises to rectify their sex with their gender identity.

5 minutes ago, none of this was happening.

Really, when you think about it, none of this was happening when you were children. None of it was happening, was when I was in school. So I'm here to ask you, what the hell is going on? What's going on? Who developed these insane theories? Who put them into schools? How did they justify doing so, and what are they attempting to do with our children?

I wrote a piece a few months ago called curiosity is a cult killer, and in that piece I briefly described how I, ended up in this mess, and the long story short was, I was curious. None of this stuff existed 5 minutes ago, now it does. I was curious.

I was preparing to be a new father, I took that responsibility tremendously seriously. I saw these things happening in the school and I was wondering what the hell is going on. And I got sick of reacting. You know, they're they're socially transitioning, socially transitioning? What does that mean? What's that?

Drag queens are in schools now? What's that about?

Teachers and school psychologists are having secretive conversations with young children behind closed doors without their parental knowledge or consent, about sex, in this thing called gender identity. What's that? And sexuality and gender affirming care? That's really weird. What is that, what is going on in our schools. I was curious.

So what do you do when you're curious? You go out and you look for information, and you read. So that's what I did. I read and I read and I read. For years. And I wasn't reading the people who were critical of all of this madness happening in schools because they were all saying the same thing. They were just reacting, it's, you turn on the news or you go on Twitter or Facebook and it's the same thing every day. Wow that's crazy, they're doing that in schools now? The next day, wow that that's crazy, they're doing that in schools now?

But I wasn't getting the answers that I needed so I went directly to the place no one wants to go directly to. The academic literature.

I went and read the people that created these theories. I went and read the teachers that are currently practicing in schools and read what they were bragging about doing in academic journals to all of their colleagues. I went and read the academic literature on their own terms, and I read and read and read, until I found myself in a place that can only be described, as hell.

I ended up in hell. And then I wrote a book about what I found. Co-authored by Dr James Lindsay. 

So what did I find?

This thing called radical gender ideology or gender theory or the transgender cult, whatever you call it, the schools call it inclusion, that thing. It has a technical name. And that technical name is Queer Theory.

Queer Theory. What is that? Queer Theory is the doctrine of a religious cult. It is a religious cult doctrine that primarily targets children.

Now I have to get this part out of the way because this is a stumbling block and it can be confusing for people, but Queer Theory has essentially nothing to do with children who may happen to be gay or lesbian. It has nothing to do with children, being concerned for them and including them and making sure they're loved and they're not bullied and helping them develop normally and lead a long healthy prosperous normal life. It has nothing to do with that. Why is that? Because Queer Theory feasts on destabilization. Revolutions require instability and destabilization to work. It's a precondition of Revolution.

So when kids who happen to be gay or lesbian or adults who happen to be gay or lesbian grow up and they fit in in society and they're getting along just as any one of us is getting along, that saps that potential revolutionary energy that political energy that that person might otherwise have. That Queer Theory can take advantage of and feed. It saps a soldier from them in their Revolution. So when you read their literature they couldn't be more clear. Queer Theory is explicitly and rabidly hostile to the idea of someone who happens to be gay or lesbian fitting in and pros, and being prosperous in society and living a happy healthy normal life.

Okay. I had to get that out of the way because that's a stumbling block for a lot of people because Queer Theory hides behind gays and lesbians to push its radical agenda. When you attack Queer Theory they hold gays and lesbians in front of them and say you're attacking them. You're attacking them.

It's a wicked trick. So Queer Theory is not that. It's a religious cult. It seeks to answer fundamental questions about the nature of our reality, the nature of our world, the nature of man, what our nature is, what human nature is. It thinks it has the answer to those questions. And it also thinks it has the answers to what the purpose of our lives must be. Not what we should do with our lives, not what we could do with our lives, but what the purpose of our lives must be.

Queer Theory's central claim, our our nature, the answer it thinks it has, is that we are all Queer. All of us. All of you. You're all Queer for Queer Theory. Now what does that mean?

Queer Theory is defined in their literature by a man called named David Halperin in 1995 in a book called St Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography and in that book Halperin defines Queer in this way. He says, quote, and I can do this verbatim because I've had to say this a million times to show how crazy this all is and what Queer means to them.

He says quote, unlike gay identity, as I was just saying, not about being gay or lesbian, unlike gay identity, Queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality. Queer is defined by its oppositional relation to the norm. It is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate and the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers, it is, it is an identity without an essence end quote.

What does that commie gobbledygook mean? It's not about gays and lesbians, but it's also not rooted in any positive truth. Queer Theory has nothing to do with the truth, nothing to do with objective truth. It has no positive vision for the world. It is a theory that is driven by pure critique. It is a purely negative theory. And it's not rooted in any stable reality. It is a destabilizing theory. It's rooted in instability.

So it's not rooted in positive truth, it has nothing to do with capital T, the truth, the objective truth, and it's a completely destabilizing theory. Sounds great, let's box it up and put it in schools and play with it with children, right?

So that's what Queer means and Queer's fundamental argument is you are all Queer. I bet you didn't know that when you woke up this morning, what I just described. I bet you didn't know you were that. But why? Why didn't you know that?

Queer Theory says it's because you are possessed. You are possessed by the Unholy social cultural and political soul of society. It has possessed you, you are under its possession. And under that possession you are convinced that such a thing as the truth is out there and it exists. You're convinced that there's a stable reality. You're convinced that being normal is okay, and that you should lead a legitimate life. It has brainwashed you. It's pulling the strings back here. It's deceiving you and convincing *you* to do things that are considered normal, and legitimate, and truthful, and rooted in a stable reality.

Queen Judith Butler, if any of you are familiar with her, in her latest book, uh which is the last thing I've read in Queer Theory because I spent years reading it and after Dr James Lindsay and I wrote this last book I couldn't read any more of it, I'd seen enough, in that book she calls this Unholy Spirit psychosocial phantasms. There's a technical name for that that you're probably all familiar with, it's called social constructions.

There's these social constructions floating out there. What is a man, what is a woman, what is a male, what is a female? All of it socially constructed and you're possessed by these to desire to be become those things, to identify as a male, to identify as a man. To identify as a female, to identify as a woman. This is what Queer Theory believes. You are under quite literally, you are under demonic, evil possession. It is convincing you to make decisions it wants you to make. It's not grabbing your hand and forcing it to the wardrobe and saying you're a man so you need to wear a suit today. Or forcing your hand into the wardrobe and saying you're a little girl, you need to wear this dress. It's convincing you to do those things yourself. It's like you've got a demon inside you that's possessed you.

So what do we do when we're possessed? We have an exorcism. We need to have an exorcism. We need to cast off this demon, this evil influence that's possessing us and convincing me I've got to have this haircut because I think it's normal, convincing me that I needed to wear this jacket because I'm giving this speech, convincing me of all of these things. We need to have an exorcism. We need to be initiated into the religious doctrine of Queer Theory that has all of the answers about how this is all supposed to work. We need to be initiated into the Mysteries. We need Queer Theory to say: hey, everything is made up and fake and reality is unstable and there's no truth. There's no such thing as normal. There's no such thing as legitimate so don't wear the suit you're wearing, get a wacky haircut, begin to live your life differently. 

Cause it's all made up and it's tricking you into presenting yourself as a man or presenting yourself as a woman or raising your kids in a certain way. It's tricking you into all of this. We need to possess this evil spirit doing this. There's a reason they say trans live, trans lives are sacred. There's a reason they say that they are transcending their fallen material form. They're transcending the beast they've become, that they were brainwashed to become. There is no such thing as sex or gender identity or sex. It's all made up and imposed and you're brainwashed into it they're transcending that. That's why they're considered sacred. They're closer to the Divine, which is their Queer nature.

But as any of you who are involved in any sort of activism or politics at all will know, it's not enough for just one person to get involved in this religious doctrine and get initiated and believe it themselves. You have to to believe it too.

If you're religious, it needs to convert you. If you're not religious, it needs to convert you. Because one of us isn't free in their minds until all of us are free. Because I can become trans and cast off everything and, look however I want to look and get away from my, my sex that was assigned at birth and my clothing style and everything, but if my neighbors aren't doing it, if my family's not doing it, if my community is not doing it, the project won't work. Because those people - normal people - are going to keep reproducing society, reproducing norms, reproducing legitimate institutions. They're going to keep reproducing this demon that's going to follow me around forever.

So to destroy the demon and and finally rid myself of possession, everyone has to be, in on the project. This explains precisely why these queer activists are so wicked. For any of you involved in any sort of activism you'll find this out right away. They're absolutely wicked to those that won't go along with the program. They'll get you fired from work, they'll get you canceled from speaking events. They'll target your children, of course. They're wicked because you must believe it too. 

Because they believe in the end if they can abolish the idea that anything is considered normal, if they can abolish the idea that there's a truth out there that we can all access, they can abolish the idea that any of your faith means anything at all. If they can abolish everything then they can all be who they really are on the inside. Which is queer. It's whatever they feel they are. Whatever they want to do, there will be no longer be someone to categorize them and define them and box them into a life and convince them to imprison themselves in their body, imprison themselves in a life that is a false fake life.

So everyone's got to go along with this project and join this exorcism process which turns out to be radical activism and going out and queering everything. Which is applying Queer Theory to everything and convincing everyone that there's no such thing as the truth, there's no such thing as normal. Why is everything so abnormal nowadays? Well activists for the last 30 years have been rampaging through our institutions convincing everyone that nothing is normal or legitimate. That's why we are where we are. That's why just a couple of weeks ago we found out, that someone was publishing papers in our Defense Department about queering, nuclear warheads, and weapons.

This problem runs really deep. Really really deep. Okay. That's the bright stuff. Let's get into some of the dark stuff.

Really quickly, I've got to talk about the people who created this I'm going to do it really fast. If you're interested in learning more about the history of its development please pick up a copy of our book. We talk about its development a lot in there. 

But there's really three key people you need to be aware of, aside from Karl Marx, uh, which I just don't have time to get into that today. But the first one is Simone de Beauvoir. Simone de Beauvoir the French Marxist feminist who wrote in 1949 a book called The Second Sex. And in that book Beauvoir's most famous line that has inspired feminists everywhere to this day and also a lot of Queer Theory, there's a direct line there, is: one is not born but becomes woman.

Why is that important? Because Beauvoir said sex is real, there's males and there's females and sex, what she says circumscribes you in the pecul-, peculiarities of your nature, meaning if you're born with certain genitalia, people treat you a certain way. But she said sex is real but there's this other thing floating around. And it's called gender. And it's a social construct. The idea of a woman doesn't exist. You can't be a woman. You become a woman. Society creates a box and puts all of the things that it wants women to be in that box, and that unholy spirit that social construction that psychosocial phantasm, then possesses little girls. You're born a female, you need to become a woman and you're punished if you don't follow that path. And and follow that demon, to Womanhood. So Beauvoir's contribution is sex is real but there's this thing called gender and it's a social construct.

Then we get to Michel Foucault, the French communist who escaped allegations of pedophilia only in death. You want some interesting history lessons search Michel Foucault and Tanzania in your browser. Good luck with that. But Foucault did exactly what Beauvoir did but with sexuality. Foucault says: sex, maybe, some aspects, maybe some of them are not, the the jury's out on that one, but gender is a social construct and sexuality is a social construct too. There is no such thing for Foucault as a person who can be homosexual, or a person who can be heterosexual as part of their intrinsic nature. Those are social constructions that were created. So heterosexuals create the idea of "the homosexual" so they can simultaneously erect an idea of "the heterosexual" and possess everyone in society to go on that route and go in that direction and become heterosexuals. Just like Beauvoir. You can't be a woman, you become a woman. You can't be a homosexual, you become a homosexual.

So now we've got gender is a social construct, sexuality is a social construct: they're all fake. Then we get to a name everyone's familiar with: Queen Judith Butler. And Judy has a wild one. Judy says sex, fake, social construct. Gender, fake, social construct. Sexuality, fake, it's all made up. It's all made up to possess you and convince you to imprison yourself in a life, to imprison yourself in a body that alienates you from who you really are in the inside. She convinces everyone that it is all made up, she says it's all an act, it's an act of theater, it's a performance. It's her theory of gender performativity. It's that our actions reflect back on society and they're coded as certain genders. It's a bunch of complex gobbledygook, but what she's saying is it's all made up. There's no such thing as these things. You're just possessed. People in power who want to be, have defined heterosexuality a certain way and males and females and man and woman, they define those things to control you and and convince you to imprison yourself in a life that is not really yours. You're not who you really are on the inside.

So those are the creators of Queer Theory as fast as, as fast as I can do it. The three big names. Then we get to how did it get into to schools? 10 minutes okay. Going to hurry. How did it get into schools?

The long story short is it rode in on the back of the critical turn in education. There's a great book out there called the Critical Turn in Education where a Marxist educational scholar, so it's a, it's a Marxist, a practicing Marxist in education describing how the Marxists took over all of the education schools. Queer Theory came in on the back of that, because by 1992, the education schools nationwide, all across North America actually, Canada too, had been completely captured by Marxists.

Queer Theory got its name in 1991 by a woman named Teresa De Lauretis in a conference in California. 1990 or 1991. And by 1993, just two years later or three years later, the first educators are going wow this looks like a great toy, this Queer Theory thing. How do we put that into schools? How do we practice that with children? That looks right. That answers all of the questions we want to answer. They're in the cult. They follow the religious doctrine. Their names are Mary Bryson and Suzanne de Castell, they're out of Canada and they write a paper calling called Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect.

Praxis is a Marxist buzz word, it means theory and practice. It's, it's a dead giveaway. But in that paper they say they want to make Queer Theory explicitly activist in nature. They want to do Queer Theory activism in schools. And then they say they're developing a queer pedagogy. Pedagogy is just a fancy word for teaching. How you teach things. And what you teach for content, how you do it. It's your methods for teaching.

They're going to make a queer pedagogy and they define it this way: queer pedagogy is a form of educative praxis. Again, Marxist buzzword. What it means is, the Mar-, Marxist education and educative praxis designed deliberately to interfere with and interfene in the production of normaly in school subjects. More commie gobbledygook. What does it mean? It means deliberately intervening in schools to make sure kids turn out abnormal. To make sure they turn out weird, deviant, depressed, anxious. That's what that means. They're doing this in 1993. That's over 30 years ago. It's in education. You can read their papers where they brag about it. The great thing about the academy is they're all trying to climb the ladder and they publish everything they do so you just have to read what they're telling you.

Within 6 years there is so much Queer Theory in schools that queer activist James T Sears has published Queering Elementary Education. It's an edited volume of teachers and activists in schools, writing about how they're practicing Queer Theory with children. It's an edited volume, dozens of teachers theorizing how to do it better, talking about their successes, talking how to, about how to expand it. This project's been going on for a very long time. 

There's a lot more to this story but the big, the big change was in 2011 with the Obama Administration. And in 2011 the Obama Administration put out a Dear Colleague letter where they introduced I think for the first time the term gender identity. And they introduced it in a Dear Colleague letter about sexual violence in schools. And discrimination based on sex. And it was there that gender identity was tied to *sexual* discrimination for the first time in the Department of Education.

So if you discriminate against someone on the basis of their gender identity, you're discriminating them, against them on the basis of their sex in the eyes of the law. It's a civil rights violation. So schools see this and they panic. What's this thing called gender identity? What are we supposed to do with this? What policies do we need to develop? The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights is going to come in here and sue us and take our federal funding if we don't do something with this. 

And who do they turn to to figure out what they're supposed to do? The very activists who create these terms. The very people practicing Queer Theory. They get the words in there and then the schools have to turn right back around and go: what's this and how do we do it? So the activists immediately have a hand on the steering wheel and get to determine how all of this is done. By 2014 things really take off and this is running rough shod through education. There are thousands of papers. thousands of papers with teachers practicing this with kids. Dozens and dozens and dozens of books. Every day there's some new person graduating uh with a nice new fancy degree in education that's writing about how they're going to do Queer Theory in schools. That's how it gets into schools, the 30,000 foot view.

What's it doing with children? I want to describe before I talk about that, I want to describe trauma bonding. B, Ben brought it up earlier. Trauma bonding is a cycle of abuse that tethers an abuser to their victim. It's a technique abusers use to isolate and destabilize their victim so they can control them. It's an abusive cycle, it comes in two waves. There's two parts to the cycle and the negative side of the cycle, they demean, and traumatize, and psychologically abuse their victim. And then on the positive side of the cycle, they validate them. They affirm them. They love bomb them. And abusers repeat this process over and over and over and over and over again. Until their victim is completely isolated from their friends and their family, their social circles that see what the abuser is doing and try and warn them. They're completely destabilized. They're so destabilized that they rely on their abusers' eyes and ears to make sense of the world for them. They rely on their abuser to find their purpose. Their meaning. They rely on their abuser to validate them. They're in their abusers' complete control because they just want the trauma to stop. They don't know what's coming next: love or trauma, love or trauma, love or trauma. They just want the trauma to stop and they realize if they just do what their abuser says, they get more of the affirmation and validation and sense of purpose. And love bombing. 

Now I read a paper that was published in 2002 by a queer activist educator named Kevin Kumashiro. Kevin Kumashiro is not a fringe figure in North American Education. He's the former dean of the education school at the University of San Francisco, he's the current dean of the education school at Hofstra University, he's worked for the NEA for multiple years, he's won dozens of awards. Everything points to him being an excellent, awesome, massive name in education. And in 2002, he wrote a paper called Against Repetition where he described how Queer Theory is practiced on kids, how how you get them involved in Queer Theory. How you stop them from wanting to be normal and wanting to live a legitimate life because again those things are oppressive. How do you break them from that cycle? Because if you don't break them, they're going to have kids and then they're going to raise their kids a certain way that's normal and legitimate, and then they're going to raise their kids, and it's, that wheel's going to keep reproducing itself. So how do you break it?

Kevin Kumashiro says: educators - this is a direct quote, verbatim - educators have a responsibility to draw students into crisis. Educators have a responsibility to draw students into crisis, so that they can manage that crisis productively. That's what Kumashiro is saying in 2002. Does that sound like something we just discussed? That's trauma bonding. He says children need to learn that they're racist. They need to learn that they're sexist, or transphobic. They need to learn they may be have been born in the wrong, wrong body. They need to learn that they were assigned a sex at birth. They need to learn that their gender was chosen for them and they were pushed into it by their parents. They need to be traumatized out of all of that. The demon's got a hold of them. We got to cast the demon off so they can be who they really are in the inside, which is whatever they say they want to be. 

So we need to traumatize them out of it. We need to break them out of it, and then we can manage it productively. We can affirm them. Hear that in our schools today? Affirm affirm affirm affirm affirm. We need to validate them. We need to love bomb them. You're a racist, you're a transphobe. Maybe you were born in the wrong body Timmy. Baybe you should be wearing other clothes. Maybe you should be doing these things. 

Timmy's completely traumatized. He's completely in crisis. He just wants it to stop. He's so confused. What do you mean I'm born in the wrong body? What does that mean? I look like a boy, how can I be a girl? It's completely destabilizing. And then Timmy learns that he can adopt a new gender identity and new pronouns and when he does so people like Kevin Kumashiro are there to love bomb him and to validate it and affirm it. And you keep doing that over and over and over until you have completely initiated, initiated a child into the religious cult that is Queer Theory. That's how it works, that's what they admit in their own literature. You can read it. If you read our book you'll see that we expose a lot of these educators, we take their words, we've got 200 something citations. I think two of them are from sources that are not educators who support this, from sources that are not people supporting this. 

It's absolutely everywhere, it's a wicked practice. It's child abuse. They are trauma bonding to your children. It's something that must stop. I have to end on a positive note and on a positive note. I'm sorry for the darkness. The great thing, like the previous speakers were saying, is we can find the light. You have to understand a situation before you understand a strategy. You can use to break it, to defeat it.

5 years ago essentially no one knew what things like Queer Theory and Critical Race Theory were. Postcolonial Theory. We didn't know much about anything, we just knew that is not normal. What is happening in the schools and now today there are thousands and thousands of people just like yourselves who are working across the country to get a better understanding of what we're dealing with so that we can fight back. And we're connecting and we're creating resources and we're helping one another and the great thing is we have the truth on our side.

Queer Theory is not rooted in any positive truth. It can't by definition ever win. It has to lose it's just when is it going to lose? And the faster we can equip ourselves with the knowledge we need to defeat it the faster we can rip it out of schools kicking and screaming because it's incredibly abusive to our children. It's tearing families apart and we need to put an end to it.

Thank you

Links - 11th July 2024 (1 - Diversity [including David Austin Walsh, i.e. White Men in Academia])

Black Myth: Wukong Devs Refused To Work with Sweet Baby Inc. - "Sweet Baby Inc. has become a huge presence in the gaming industry. They influenced the development of many current and upcoming games...   It is also interesting to note that Sweet Baby Inc. is more influential in the West. Games from Asian regions typically aren’t influenced by them, though there are exceptions, like the Silent Hill 2 Remake.  Nonetheless, this won’t impact Black Myth Wukong in any meaningful way. One might even expect the game to be better because of Game Science’s refusal. While diversity and representation in games are not wrong, forced inclusivity seems like an unwise move. It makes even less sense for a game like Black Myth Wukong, which is based on existing source material.  Sweet Baby Inc. is also known for not caring much about its projects. Therefore, Game Science likely made a wise decision. Many have even argued that Sweet Baby Inc. has no place in gaming."

Pirat_Nation 🔴 on X - ">Chinese media: 'Black Myth: Wukong' refused to be extorted $7 million by SweetBaby.
English: The reason why the team behind "Black Myth: Wukong" has been subjected to persistent sexist attacks and slander since their first promotional video is because they have consistently refused political correctness guidance and rejected the extortionate guidance fees of millions of dollars demanded by these political correctness teams.  Actually, such teams are quite common in Europe and America. They interfere with works like "Assassin's Creed" "Dying Light 2 Stay Human" and "God of War" by pushing for politically correct female protagonists. These changes are the direct result of the interference and guidance of such teams.  Game science teams refuse to communicate with these groups and reject their interference. Most importantly, they refuse to pay the exorbitant $7 million in guidance fees. This is the direct reason why they are being attacked and slandered. Some justifications are based on the team's lack of diversity or representation, which doesn't align with the political correctness standards.  A typical example is an article by a major IGN writer criticizing "Hogwarts Legacy" and refusing to evaluate or promote it due to its alleged lack of political correctness."

Square Enix Shareholder Presses Company President On Relationship With Sweet Baby Inc., Receives Non-Answer In Return - "“I would like to refrain from making specific comments about individual clients,” said Kiryu, per @Michsuzu. “As we shift from quantity to quality, providing content that is enjoyable and safe for our customers is also part of what makes a product fun. We will do our best as creators.”... While “safe” could mean a game that is a ‘safe bet’ for investors, in this context it seems far more likely it means a game that does not offend any sociopolitical sensibilities.  Safe games are partly the reason Sweet Baby Inc.- and Square Enix efforts at DEI – have been so loathed. Rather than simply avoid offense surrounding a given subject, DEI demands that said subject instead be presented as particularly special, often unrealistically so.  Combine this sentiment with poor writing, and what usually results is characters and stories that feel like a soapbox, rather than entertainment.   And when the gameplay also turns out to be bad, as seen in the Sweet Baby Inc.-influenced Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, it can be hard not to imagine that the money and time spent by studios on the consultation studio’s efforts would have been better spent on improving the quality of their actual products. Sadly, as players know, Square Enix has made a concerted effort in recent years to sand the edges off their various titles in order to boost their sales among Western audiences, the results have which include the censoring of Tifa Lockheart’s outfit in Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth, the addition of non-binary gender options to Harvestella, and the softening of slavery-related dialogue in Final Fantasy XVI.  Nonetheless, there are signs Square Enix isn’t entirely beholden to DEI. Final Fantasy VII Rebirth featured beachwear for Tifa and Aerith while joking about the male characters understandable reactions, and Mana Series Producer Masaru Oyamada in an April interview made clear his belief that it’s “best to deliver [a] game based on the developers’ creative vision.”"

Why do so many adverts here have a black woman with a shaved head? : r/AskUK - "Am i the only one noticing this? I'm not trying to discriminate or anything, but i've never seen a black woman with a shaved head in real life, yet I keep seeing them in adverts..."
"It’s not just that.  It’s pretty much every advert with have black representation despite only making up only 4% of the population, yet by comparison despite making up 9.3% you’ll see far less Asian people"
"So why no Chinese and Indian people ? I never see them in ads"
"Because it's a result of BLM and not an attempt at anything more than easy virtue signalling unfortunately"
"Black ppl only make up 13.5% of London and they’re absolutely everywhere in Uk media/ads. South Asians make up significantly more of Londons population than that and they don’t get anywhere the same rep.  The truth is western society (esp the more americanised ones) has HUGEEEE fetish for black people. Just look at how many black male/white female couplings there are in ads/media in the west."
"I like to play spot the Indian in adverts and tv. There are pretty much none. It feels weird when they are such a big part of the culture and are so numerous.  It has certainly happened in the last few years"
"Since BLM especially there is a huge push for DEI and employees and agencies are actually rated on it. It has a big effect on industry awards as well."
"Plus there are quotas to meet. This is just ITV!"
"I personally like it when you have a black mother, white dad and asian child."
"I recall a study/survey that basically said black people really appreciated seeing themselves represented in advertising, whereas for other races it didn't move the needle."
"And the couples always have to be interracial, and the only time they're not it's a black couple. It's quite rare to see a standard white couple  Once you notice you can't unsee it.  (I'm not black or white, just for context)"
"Okay black British woman here to throw some ideas for what I think is happening here.  First off, it's really not that common for black women in the UK to go totally bald but I would ask you to think about this situation as you would with any other type of marketing - the models usually aren't reflective of the average person. Marketing/advertising teams make casting choices based on industry trends and these don't always correlate with reality for any demographic. Think of it like asking "all the white women I seen on tv are blonde and skinny but why all the ones in my town are fatter and darker haired". Marketing isn't designed to be genuinely representative of the average person, it's there to sell products to whoever is most likely to buy them.  If I'm to give a personal theory as to why they go for shaved hair, it's because black women's hair is so unbelievably political that sometimes it's easier to go for no hair and avoid the entire conversation altogether whilst also scoring 'representation points'. If a black woman on an ad has natural hair, people (mostly black people) will complain that it looks nappy and bad or will argue about the texture and style of the hair. If they use extensions or wigs others will complain that they arre too 'Eurocentric' and ashamed of their hair. The bald-headed cool model vibe is one that pretty much no one will argue against even though very few black women in the UK actually look like this (Skunk Anansie's Skin is hard carrying for the entire bald-headed team).  Personally, I think the bald headed black woman vibe is made to appeal to progressive middle class white people over any other demographic (not to say it doesn't appeal to other groups). The products and services I see that specifically target the black demographic generally have an entirely different vibe."
Naturally, this got removed

Junk Science Week: Does sex really count in the operating room? - "her projections thus show that majority-female surgical teams would experience no post-operative complications and make no mistakes. If that’s true, it suggests the entire health-care sector ought to be purged of men immediately... There are, however, a few caveats to consider before we usher men out of the OR for good. Despite clamorous media attention, not all the available evidence backs a distaff advantage. A recent study from Japan, for example, found no difference between male and female surgeons. More importantly, it needs to be firmly established we are not comparing surgical apples to surgical oranges. As one of the JAMA Surgery studies acknowledges, “Patients treated by female surgeons were more likely to have undergone general, obstetric or gynecologic, or plastic surgeries, while those treated by male surgeons were more likely to have undergone cardia, neurosurgical, orthopedic or urologic procedures.” These differences are quite dramatic. Of 58,912 neurosurgeries in the study, 56,049 — or 95 per cent — were performed by men. The same holds for cardiothoracic procedures. A similar imbalance can be found in the BJS study. Surgical teams at hospitals with greater than 35 per cent female representation accounted for a mere 1.7 per cent of all cardiac operations in Ontario between 2009 and 2019. For neurosurgeries, it was 10.3 per cent. The riskiest operations — those involving brains and hearts, in particular — are overwhelmingly handled by men at hospitals with mostly male surgical teams. Every surgical procedure obviously entails some degree of risk, but a neurosurgeon is exposed to a far greater possibility of post-operative complications and higher overall costs in comparison with colleagues doing routine breast reductions. While the authors claim their calculations correct for surgical complexity, the implications here are so great that an expert second — and perhaps third — opinion seems warranted. Another problem with these studies, and perhaps the entire health-care system, is the extremely low share of female surgeons despite decades of effort to boost their representation. Women accounted for less than seven per cent of all surgeries in the BJS study and 13 per cent in the two JAMA Surgery studies. Given that women have been in the majority at Canadian medical schools since the 1990s, the paucity of female surgeons remains a mystery. The preferred CBC explanation involves systemic discrimination and unfair wage gaps. Yet ample anecdotal evidence suggests the biggest determinant is the freely made choices of female physicians themselves. Compared to other medical pursuits, surgical work is extremely time-consuming, arduous and stressful. When JAMA asked Mary Ann Hopkins, an attending general surgeon at the New York University Medical Center, why there aren’t more women surgeons, she said, “It’s probably because of the long hours and the family sacrifices that you have to make.” Evidence also points to a strong preference among female doctors for part-time work, which is typically incompatible with a surgical specialty. As for the notion that diverse teams always produce better results — and that there’s a sweet spot where these benefits are maximized — evidence suggests opposite or null effects are just as likely. A U.S. study on racial diversity within nursing teams, for example, found that bringing together divergent world views at work led to frequent breakdowns in cohesion. “Alternative realities encourage participants to attribute causation differently which … fuels team conflict and miscommunication,” the authors reported. In the business world, claims that adding women to corporate boards will improve the performance of publicly-traded companies was conclusively demolished by Wharton School of Business professor Katherine Klein. “There is no evidence available to suggest that the addition, or presence, of women on the board actually causes a change in company performance,” Klein wrote in 2017... If the striking gaps in complexity and risk between male and female surgeons have been properly accounted for, along with many other potentially confounding factors, then it’s conceivable there is a distinct and measurable benefit attributable to female surgeons — perhaps due to immutable, sex-based characteristics such as emotional intelligence, rule-following and communications skills. And then what? The research raises many uncomfortable questions no one seems to want to discuss. (Hallet declined multiple requests to respond.) If the data shows women make better surgeons, should an evidence-based policy seek to replace male surgeons with women? And if so, what should we make of the obvious reluctance among female physicians to become surgeons? Perhaps we are stuck with less-than-ideal men as surgeons because they’re the only ones prepared to do the job. And what should patients think of all this? Since most Canadians cannot choose their surgeon, is getting a male surgeon another lamentable example of the lack of choice embedded in Canada’s rigid and monopolistic public health-care system? Finally, if we accept the proposition that women make better surgeons for a variety of sex-determined factors, does this effect work both ways? It stands to reason there must be other occupations in which men have a similar advantage due to their inherent traits of risk-taking, independence, assertiveness, physical strength, STEM skills and so on. Jobs like air force pilot, movie director, firefighter and software designer. And if sex matters on the job, could race and ethnicity also affect occupational performance? Are we prepared to go wherever the data points us?"

Meme - i/o @eyeslasho: "Prior to 2003, how many points did University of Michigan admissions award applicants who had obtained perfect SAT scores?  Answer: 12 points
And how many points did it give an applicant for merely being black?  Answer: 20 points"
Left wingers still lie that DEI is about ensuring that everyone is on a level playing field by eliminating discrimination against minorities

[SocJus] Kyle Brink, Executive Producer of Dungeons & Dragons, says in response to question about racial diversity in tabletop gaming, "in my viewpoint, honestly, guys like me can't leave soon enough for this hobby" : KotakuInAction - "By now everyone knows about WotC's recent attempt to kill the Open Game License, the major backlash that doing so provoked from other publishers and the general community, and WotC's eventual capitulation.  Now, D&D Executive Producer Kyle Brink (who's only been with WotC for two years, and only been EP of D&D for eight months), who has put himself forward as the person speaking for WotC on this subject (for instance, he was the one under whose name the announcement of them abandoning their plans to scrap the original OGL was made) is going on an apology tour. And one of his first stops is the Youtube channel of a group called 3 Black Halflings.  At approximately 46:57, he's asked about WotC's policies around hiring racially diverse individuals in "positions of power." As part of his (rather rambling) response, he touches on how "guys like me" (note: Brink is white) are "leaving the workforce," before saying (at 49:25) "in my viewpoint, honestly, guys like me can't leave soon enough for this hobby."  My fucking god...  When did gaming stop being for everyone? When did it get taken over by people who decided that being the wrong ethnicity inherently meant being against inclusivity, and so being inclusive meant kicking those people out? Because it breaks my heart to see the hobby I love being run by people like this."
Weird. We keep being told that diversity is not about getting rid of white people

Meme - David Austin Walsh: "I mean, I applied to something like 40 jobs this year-all but four of them were AfAm positions, and/or race/ethnicity positions, and despite my work explicitly being about white supremacy I stand no chance of being hired for those positions."
David Austin Walsh: "I just published an academic book that is getting plaudits. I've written numerous peer-reviewed articles for the @nytimes! I'm a talented teacher and my classees have been very popular at every university I've taught at. Hell, I had a kid here at Yale try to enroll in my class this past semester because he heard through word of mouth that my class at UVA was really good! But I'm 35 years old, I'm 4+ years post-PhD, and -- quite frankly -- I'm also a white dude. Combine those factors together and I'm for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian."
Guess he wasn't serious about dismantling white supremacy but stepping aside and letting black people take his job

RACE NARRATIVE BACKFIRE: DEI “expert on white supremacy” complains that nobody will hire him because he’s white - "An almost contrived-seeming DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) encounter took place on the X platform this week between a fair-skinned "expert on white supremacy" and the "far right" in desperate need of a job, and a presumably person-of-color (POC) female who currently holds a high-level, tenure-track position at Yale University.  A white-looking guy named David Austin Walsh who has written entire books about how bad he thinks white people are started complaining on social media about how none of the 40-something jobs he says he has applied for so far this year are willing to hire him because his skin is not dark or ethnic enough.  "I mean, I applied to something like 40 jobs this year – all but four of them were AfAm and / or race / ethnicity positions, and despite my work explicitly being about white supremacy I stand no chance of being hired for those positions," Walsh tweeted.  The anti-white crusader was met with harsh POC backlash, including from a "Science & Technology" account that mocked Walsh for thinking that his reward in life would be a cushy sinecure.  Another user chimed in following a discourse that Walsh had with the Yalie who sarcastically and pridefully mocked his expectations while seemingly laughing the entire time about the irony of the conversation.  "Academic who researches the right realizes he can't get a job because he's a white male," another X user wrote in jest about the exchange. "He complains, gets laughed at by a woman at Yale. He accuses her of 'punching down' at him, thinking lack of employment makes up for his race and sex. Talk about a teachable moment.""

Richard Hanania on X - "When I was at UCLA, I had a political science professor who was near retirement and told us he was a "refugee" from the history department. He studied the Cold War, and there was no interest in that in history departments anymore because every research agenda had to revolve"

@ijbailey on X - "It’s “plausible” that a young white dude can’t get a job but young POC and women can? On what planet?"
Wilfred Reilly on X - "This one, man. The open denial of the fact that affirmative action affects hiring and/or admissions IN ACADEMIA - which I see constantly - is simply bizarre. At least for grad school, law school, med school, and post-docs, we literally just know how candidates of different races with the same quals do. These below are four fairly representative graphics - more focused on admissions than hiring, but illustrating the issue across different major collegiate systems and looking not only at undergraduates but at young professionals who are working but enrolled.   Faculty hiring often follows similar trajectories. Damned odd to simply - and sincerely, so far as I can tell - to just respond to this by yelling "Not so!""
🇨🇦halogen on X - "You begin to suspect that the "racial politeness" rule about denying the practical existence of affirmative action has actually fooled some particularly incurious people into thinking that affirmative action genuinely has no real-world effects somehow."
aahzmandius_of_perv on X - "They wouldn't get so crazed, like angry to the point where they seem to wish that violence was an option, if they didn't didn't know the truth. They just really hate having it made blatant."

Thread by @feelsdesperate on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "As an undergrad I took a ‘race, class, and gender’ history seminar led by a white Ivy-PhD postdoc who would give me a dirty look on the rare occasion I’d venture a milquetoast centrist opinion.  I went to her office hours at the end of the semester to pick something… …up and asked her what she was doing next year. She remarked bitterly that she didn’t know and that, ‘they only want to hire people who are black,’ for the tenure track jobs.  As best I can tell this sort of person imagines themselves to be… …a ‘member of the Party’ and thus deserving of special privileges and immunity from the predictable consequences of their politics.  If that doesn’t end up happening and they’re fed into the grinder like everyone else it’s a huge shock and they’re outraged and bereft."

Finnegans Take on X - "Here's what I don't get: Reading through this thread, everything being described seems to be pretty much exactly what progressives have always said they wanted. So why are so many offended when you point out that they achieved their goals? Shouldn't they be celebrating?"

Meme - Noah Smith: "Oh dear lord. The same guy took a practice LSAT and bombed it, and blamed it on the questions being "right-wing""
DavidAstinWalsh David 2022-RELATED PUN Walsh: "Welp, just took a practice LSAT and it looks like law school is out. It is pretty bonkers how right-wing some of these questions are, though."

Thread by @JohnDSailer on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Do universities discriminate against white candidates? Yes. Especially when hiring professors focused on identity/social justice.  These positions give universities plausible deniability for race-based hiring, which is common in academia.  I have receipts. 🧵
It’s worth remembering the academic job market’s total saturation in positions focused on race, identity, and social justice.  Things like "indigenous Siberian studies" and classics with a focus on "race, racism, and Greek & Roman studies." This has entirely skewed certain disciplines. A grad student looking at a field like, say, German studies will be able to put two and two together.  There are hardly any jobs out there, and the jobs that are out there tend to fit a specific theme. If you’re a historian, well...
A grad student in the shoes of David Austin Walsh might think they have the right formula: even if you’re a white guy, just specialize in the right things, then you'll have at least a shot.  That is verifiably incorrect.  Universities very explicitly say these race/identity/social justice jobs exist to target specific groups. They get very close to openly declaring their intention to discriminate in the hiring process. I've repeatedly found search committees openly admit to using racial preferences.
Ohio State sought a professor of French studies with a "specialization in Black France."  The search committee stated that hiring a “visible minority” was a key priority—so they only invited black candidates for on campus interviews. The University of Washington conducted a search for a professor focused on diversity.  A white woman was the search committee's first choice.  A diversity committee member objected on the grounds of race.  They then re-ranked the candidates. Here's the University of Washington diversity advisory committee member noting that it's "optically-speaking" a bad look that the offer to go to a white woman.
This is the goal of "cluster hiring," hiring multiple candidates at once w/ a focus on DEI, increasingly popular in academia.  In the sciences, that means heavily weighing DEI statements. But in the humanities, it commonly involves hiring w/ a race/identity/social justice focus. A professor friend recently told me that everyone in his university system acts like cluster hiring is just a legal form of racial quotas.  But again, we don't have to rely on rumors. Administrators have literally said that's exactly what they're doing.
We have the worst of both worlds.  Our universities contort entire academic disciplines, narrowly focusing on social justice, applying de facto ideological weed-out tools like diversity statements—all for the sake of achieving (or masking) racial preferences."
I still see left wingers deny that white men are discriminated against in hiring. Either that or they mock them for not being good enough

John Sailer on X - "An article on DEI cluster hiring quotes one university dean, who describes the process in detail. Her response to the charge that she was hiring based on race: "I absolutely am!""
Colleges Look to Cluster Hires Amid Diversity Hostilities | Diverse: Issues In Higher Education

Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: "Finding a case of minority preference in academia is like finding a case of a slave being treated better than an individual white man.  Imagine going on the job market and having the realization that these are the people you’re going to have to grovel to in order to make it."
@ijbailey @ijbailey: "It's "plausible" that a young white dude can't get a job but young POC and women can? On what planet?"
Matthew Yglesias @mattysgl...: "He's incredibly annoying but I think the hypothesis is plausible"
EyeOnStalk @EyeOnStalk: "I think it is in this highly specific case. There aren't that many jobs in history departments and what he's saying is of the 40 he interviewed for, most are in minority studies fields and admins want to hire minorities. You can't conceive of an individual case?"
@ijbailey: "I'm sure I can find "an individual case" of a black slave being treated better than an individual white man during the height of race- based chattel slavery, too, if I look hard enough."

Thread by @matthewgburgess on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In light of the recent discussion on here about academic affirmative action in faculty hiring (re: David Austin Walsh), it's time to move on from the question of "is it happening" (it is) and talk about "is it right/legal/etc." For example, in Nov. 2022, I asked our Dean at a faculty senate meeting what fraction of hires in the last 2-3 years were from FDAP (i.e. the Faculty Diversity Action Plan, our DEI hiring program, which has since been rebranded). His answer: over 90%. From the public minutes: The new program, whose intent is somewhat better masked, is called Critical Needs Hires. Interestingly, the public Nov. 15 faculty senate minutes seem to have been since removed from the website:
Exhibit B: In Canada, unlike the US, this stuff is clearly legal, so it is often done explicitly. I had noticed that since 2020 most Canada Research Chair positions advertised race and gender restrictions in who could apply. This year, I was curious and decided to track. From July 1 to Dec 31, I found 71 CRC searches. 39 of these (55%) explicitly barred straight white men (and often other groups too) from applying.
Exhibit C, from Bloomberg (not academia, but similar dynamic):
As @mattyglesias pointed out, universities are trying to solve (or avoid acknowledging) a simple math problem. Aging faculty + slow turnover = slow diversification. E.g. suppose you had 40 faculty in a unit that got to hire ever 3 years, and currently had 25 white guys. If you set a goal of only having 15 white guys (most would say not that ambitious), it would still take 30 years with a policy of no white-male hires and only WM retirees. IME, admins aren't willing to face that problem & say to activist students that it will take a really long time, or admit they are putting a thumb on the scale, or that putting a thumb on the scale (in the US) might be illegal. So ppl twist themselves in knots of dissonance.
BTW, I've hesitated for a long time before posting those minutes above. I <3 CU and don't think CU is unusual in what has been going on, and so I didn't and don't want CU to be unfairly singled out. (I also tried to raise this for years through proper internal channels.) I have seen this at every school I've been at over the past 10 years. I was told in 3/7 faculty interviews in 2017-2018 that my demographics were disqualifying for at least some SC members. But I'm sharing now it because it's annoying that we're still stuck on the "is it real?" conversation when we should be having the "is it right? Is it legal?" conversation. My personal answers would be "no" and "I'm not a lawyer but I'd guess no (Title VI & VII)", but there are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides. IME those denying it's real most loudly on X also argue vociferously for it behind the scenes. Make your case publicly!
The other reason I am sharing this now is that, as a mentor to WM trainees, I am tired of the gaslighting. There isn't a single faculty member at a major college that hasn't seen this/been aware of this, especially since 2020. If it's right, defend it. If it's not, stop. BTW, someone (HT @rwlesq) alerted me to the fact that the Bloomberg study has been criticized for its methodology. (The rest of the thread stands though.)"
Of course, left wingers still deny there's discrimination against white men
The fact that the people denying it the loudest on Twitter are pushing it the most is the clearest example of left wingers lying about this