Tag: political correctness

UC Berkeley Math Professor Makes a Startling Revelation About Her Students as She Blasts School’s Woke Admissions Policy, Which an Obama Admin. Official Implemented

One of the nation’s supposedly most rigorous colleges is completely infested with unqualified students, forcing a calculus teacher to come forward with a stunning revelation.

Zvezdelina Stankova, a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, wrote a damning op-ed in the San Francisco Standard last week excoriating the university’s woke admissions standards, which Then-President Janet Napolitano implemented.

Back in 2020, Napolitano, who served as Homeland Security Secretary under former President Barack Obama, overruled a task force that urged the school to phase out the SAT and ACT.

She argued that doing so was proper due to pandemic disruptions and ‘equity’ concerns.

The Regents voted later that year to make testing optional. Then, a court ruling focused on access for students with disabilities required UC to become test-blind through 2025.

Due to this policy, Stankova noted that because the kids are so far behind on mathematics, she has to spend her time teaching middle-school math to them.

Not high school. Middle school.

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Is Amazon Suppressing a Book That Criticizes Islam?

Yes, I wrote the book in question, but that’s beside the point. If they can do it to me, they can do it to anyone who doesn’t hold the views that the leftist establishment finds acceptable. With Amazon being almost the only source for books now, and by far the largest, that’s a dangerous development for any society that values the freedom of speech.

It’s an odd thing. My latest book, The Tragedy of Islam: it has an Amazon page, and that page seems to be in full working order. You can find it here.

If, however, you didn’t click on that link I just provided, but instead went to Amazon and tried to find the book yourself, if your experience is anything like mine just now, you will see that the book is impossible to find. Search for it every which way, and it does not come up. Is Amazon trying to suppress access to this book? It sure looks as if it is.

I asked several other people to replicate this experiment, and they had the same results: They could find the book by clicking on a pre-existing link, but no matter what they searched for at Amazon, including the book’s specific title, subtitle, and author, it doesn’t come up. If you have a minute, please try it yourself and let me know in the comments what results you get.

I found this out because I needed the link to the book’s sale page, and as I was already at Amazon, instead of going to my website and clicking on the link there, I typed the book’s title into the search bar. What came up for “The Tragedy of Islam” was Imam Mohammad Tawhidi’s book from several years ago of the same name and a host of other books with similar names, but my book The Tragedy of Islam was nowhere to be seen. In fact, my book did not appear on the entire page of results for a search of the exact title of the book.

This is not normal. I typed in the names of a few of my other recent books, and they came right up in the searches, either as the first or second result.

So I started to search for The Tragedy of Islam with more information: by the full title, The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses, as well as “The Tragedy of Islam Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam Robert Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam by Robert Spencer,” and even “The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses by Robert Spencer, Bombardier Books.” Every search turned up another book I had written, or else Tawhidi’s book. None of the searches, not one, turned up the actual book The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses anywhere on the first page of search results.

Yet the book is offered at Amazon. Apparently, however, you can only get to it by clicking on a link to it you may find somewhere, not by searching at Amazon. This is a new form of censorship I haven’t encountered before. Amazon can say that they are offering the book for sale and that all is well. They’re just hiding it.

In the past, Amazon has dropped Mohammed’s Koran by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson, as well as McLoughlin’s Easy Meat about the Muslim rape gang scandals in the UK, and so it’s not at all beyond the realm of possibility that they’re suppressing The Tragedy of Islam, which argues that Islam is a failure, bad for both individuals and societies. They got a lot of heat, however, for dropping the earlier books, and so this time they can say there is no problem at all: The book is in stock and listed, and they’re taking orders for it. Hiding it? Ah, come on, Spencer, you’re just being paranoid!

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They’re Getting Revenge, Starting Today…

I absolutely insist to you: I really am trying to stop writing about this topic. But too much insanity keeps breaking out, and I have no choice but to comment on it.

You know the story: a Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, was found to have plagiarized his dissertation, borrowed heavily from others in his published articles, produced essentially worthless research, called the police on a reporter and on a professor who asked questions about his resume, invented wild tales of athletic and academic achievement as well as philanthropic work, and (of course) accused his critics of “racism.” And then, late last week, he was found dead at his home in an apparent suicide.

That would have been it, but the left – instead of the embarrassment it should feel at having promoted the greatest academic charlatan of the past ten years (and that’s saying something) – is trying to play the victim here: mean right-wingers in the media shouldn’t have pushed so hard on the Arday story.

This is coming from people who call their enemies Nazis 24 hours a day without thinking there might be a problem with that.

Anyway, here’s the latest: the university that employs Nathan Cofnas, the academic who first broke the story about Jason Arday’s plagiarism and worthless “research,” is now being investigated by his own university for breaking the story.

Just when you think academia can’t be a bigger joke, it always finds some way to outdo itself.

Ghent University rector Petra de Sutter, former leader of the Green Party, issued a statement to the effect that while Ghent attaches “great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial,” it wants the world to know that of course it doesn’t really mean that:

“That freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.

“For this reason, the university takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.”

Well, we just found out what that means.

They just suspended Nathan Cofnas, and he will almost surely be fired.

Cofnas wrote the original report on Jason Arday that forced academia to take notice. What he found was too embarrassing not to elicit a response. And his point is: Arday is not an isolated case. For that he cannot be forgiven.

As Cofnas put it on August 11:

In 2023, the Guardian itself (!) published a breathless article titled “Jason Arday: he learned to talk at 11 and read at 18 – then became Cambridge’s youngest Black professor.”

More than a dozen academic journals gave the imprimatur of “peer review” to Arday’s plagiarized wokebabble.

The prestigious New York publisher Simon & Schuster is still going ahead with his memoirs.

Now the Guardian wants us to think this is just about “one academic and his bosses at Cambridge”?

There are thousands of Jason Ardays in universities all over the Western world. The only thing special about Arday is that he took the plagiarism and lies about his personal life too far, so there was a hook for a news story. But even that wasn’t enough to get him removed from academia. Until last Wednesday Cambridge was still smearing his critics as waging a “vile campaign.” He crossed the line not by being an incompetent fraud, but by claiming prestigious affiliations that he didn’t have, creating conflict between Cambridge and other universities.

“DEI” means achieving representation by doing away with elementary standards for certain people based on race. Just take a look at the content of “peer-reviewed” journals like Whiteness in Education and Educational Philosophy and Theory. The other papers in these journals are just like those written by Arday—someone who is now widely recognized to be mentally disabled.

The people trying to write this off as a fluke or an isolated case of “research misconduct” are at best delusional. The ideology of elite institutions is DEI, and DEI is Jason Arday.

This was the most embarrassing academic episode of my lifetime. Everyone just witnessed a clear-cut case of academic fraud, a man who literally called the police on people who questioned his resume, and the overwhelming response from academia was to scream “racism” and sign a petition in his defense.

After they did that, the really embarrassing stuff came out, and they persisted.

So the mask is off, in case there’s still anyone out there who didn’t know what was behind it. The whole edifice of academia nowadays is held together with Scotch tape and piano wire, and slogans.

The institutions will survive as shells of their former selves, but what was once inside will disappear. Adrian Vermeule, the one sane person at Harvard Law School, just wrote: “The elite universities are of course going to survive. They’ve been around forever and will continue on in some form. What will not survive, however, is a certain idea of the scholarly mission and life. It died of its own weakness, an inability to resist invading barbarians.”

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China Quietly WEAPONIZING Our Own Heritage While Hollywood Bows and Apologizes

Christopher Nolan sat down in Beijing recently to promote “The Odyssey.” But this wasn’t your typical press junket with softball questions and movie clips. A Chinese political philosophy student named Zhong Shu grilled him for nearly 20 minutes about Homer, hubris, the fall of Athens, and whether Hollywood has turned greatness into something that requires an apology.

The interview went viral for good reason. It was a masterclass — but not the kind Americans are used to seeing.

Zhong didn’t just ask about special effects or casting choices. She came prepared with Thucydides and challenged Nolan on whether he had “Christianized” Homer. She asked if the gods in his film were just projections of the human psyche. And then she cut to the heart of it all.

“We turn greatness into privileges and we demand apologies for it. That’s a fact of Hollywood,” Zhong stated before asking Nolan if he agreed.

Nolan didn’t dodge. He didn’t spin. He described it the way an engineer describes a load-bearing wall: This is simply how the mechanism works in our culture today. In a democratic age committed to equality, storytellers have to manage the audience’s built-in resistance to greatness. Do we have to apologize for that greatness?

“And the answer is yes, we do,” he said.

Think about that. The West’s most prominent living filmmaker just calmly conceded that his civilization can no longer receive a story about greatness unless greatness acknowledges wrongdoing first. And he delivered this admission in Beijing to an educated Chinese classicist who came prepared with provocations from our own civilization’s foundational myths.

This wasn’t a random interview. It was a snapshot of a much bigger conflict — a narrative cold war where each civilization is grappling with its relationship to the guiding stories of the past in an effort to determine which culture will lead the world in the future.

For years — with very little media attention — China has been quietly engaged in a narrative arms race with an American culture it believes is in decline. There’s a belief within the Chinese government that the modern West abandoned its own inheritance by deconstructing its foundational myths and values, and that now is the time to build where we have faltered. So for years, the Chinese have been mining the “classics” of Western Civilization for the insights that once gave us a civilizational advantage.

In November 2024, Beijing hosted the first World Conference of Classics: 600 participants and scholars, a congratulatory letter from Xi Jinping read aloud by the CCP’s propaganda chief, and a new Chinese School of Classical Studies established in Athens. Over the past decade, Peking University and Renmin have built classical studies programs too.

A key figure in China’s modern fascination with Western classical education is political philosopher Liu Xiaofeng, who spent the 2000s importing “Great Books education” into Chinese universities at precisely the moment Western universities were more focused on critiquing, subverting, and deconstructing these stories. Three of his students now run a classics division inside the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Here in the U.S., we’re finally starting to wake up. Even if Nolan’s interpretation of Homer’s epic myth is a matter of debate, the fact that he believed it was the right time to return to a 2,800-year-old story means something. Hollywood has been in a confused state of nostalgia for quite some time — prequels, sequels, reboots, sometimes deconstructing classic fairy tales and modern mythic heroes, other times celebrating them.

What’s undeniable is that the relationship to these stories of our past matters.

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Oregon State Mentors Face Social Justice Criteria After Ending Official DEI Program

Woke has not yet been destroyed in Oregon, where, according to a Campus Reform report, “Oregon State University requires applicants for its 2026–27 Academic Learning Assistant positions to demonstrate an ability to learn “social justice principles and concepts,” even after the university ended two diversity programs.”

In other words, its DEI is just not called by name.

Oregon State wants its Mentors trained in political correctness and Social Justice, even if not called DEI.

“Another residence-life position now makes a commitment to diversity or social-justice education, initiatives, and programs a minimum qualification rather than a preferred one.”

These requirements are absurd and unfair, but that’s come to be expected at this point at left-leaning universities.

“The university’s Academic Learning Assistant page says the live-in mentors serve one per residential community and work an average of 15 hours per week. Applicants must hold at least a 3.0 GPA. Oregon State also prefers applicants who demonstrate engagement with diversity and social-justice education, initiatives, or programs.”

“Academic Learning Assistants meet individually with residents, hold weekly office hours, conduct hall rounds, and lead two or three academic-success workshops per term. They also contact students experiencing academic difficulty, make referrals, and staff residence-hall front desks.”

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The Cruelty Of DEI

This past week ended with shock and sadness at the news that Jason Arday ended his own life in the midst of an investigation over his intellectual credibility. He was the vaunted education sociologist at Cambridge University, media darling and beneficiary of a big book contract, the toast of the town, and the subject of countless hagiographic profiles in media venues.

Plenty of people had whispered for years that he nowhere near qualified for all this celebration. He was not a genius. He was a fabulist. Saying it, however, was dangerous to one’s career. As a result, he kept getting away with it. His luck ran out when a U.S. academic pressed the issue. The tissue of lies collapsed.

The circumstances surrounding his absurd appointment to a full professorship with a named chair – the youngest black professor to enjoy such privilege – are hardly unique to him. When the full truth coming out about his plagiarism and autobiographical embellishments hit the international news, despair overwhelmed him in tragic ways.

It goes without saying that this young man had benefitted from what’s called DEI, which is the new term for what used to be called “affirmative action” but mutated into rampant privilege based on raw identity politics. Reverse racism doesn’t describe it fully. It is institutionalized discrimination that breeds deep resentment from those passed over and cultivates hidden contempt for those who ride this wave to unearned prestige and plaudits.

Something else has always bugged me about these systems that confer high titles and salaries on people solely on grounds of their race. It is deeply condescending and cruel to the point of being abusive of our fellow human beings. While it is easy to resent people who benefit from unearned exaltation, the plight of those who are its seeming beneficiaries also deserves some attention.

Years ago I had the opportunity to get to know a university administrator and his wife who occupied such a role. We met at a dinner party. He was the only black gentleman in the upper echelon of a major state university. His title was vice president for civil rights or some such made-up badge. It was a position invented to create the appearance of diversity. The position fell to him because he ticked all the boxes.

He was proud of his new position. But the more we spoke, the more he had doubts that he would express under his breath. He said that he has a large budget and staff but is rarely included as part of any serious planning team. He told me that he is mostly sent out on fundraising efforts to tell his story about how he grew up poor, overcame racism, and now has a prestigious position in university administration. But, he told me with frankness, he is tired of that story of himself.

We met up a few weeks later because I was curious to know more. He laid it all out to me. He came of age in an educational environment that was especially seeking blacks who performed above expectations which he always did. But instead of moving up a notch based on merit, he said he became aware early on that he was being accelerated and escalated beyond a level that was justified.

It became obvious in his college admissions, which pushed him into an institution far above that for which he was prepared. He found himself lost in a sea of high achievers. His privilege became a burden. He could not keep up in his classes and began to cut corners. It became obvious to him early that he was going to get away with this.

It seemed like the entire system was on his side. He tried to justify this to himself on grounds that every university has white kids on trust funds with legacy connections. They work less hard than a working-class kid who made it on his own so perhaps this is not unusual.

But, he said, he always felt burdened in multiple directions. It was sad enough that he grew up poor and black in the Deep South and was not expected to achieve. But it was far worse that he was given advancements beyond what he deserved when everyone knew it and considered him to be little more than a token of a compensatory system.

He described to me that choice he had to make. He could refuse the high grades, the advanced placements, the awards and attention that he knew were unmerited. But he was never sure what the point of that would be. Instead, he accepted them all as part of a game. He lost trust and respect in the system that he joined precisely because the system never really expected a high degree of performance from him.

He continued in this vein to tell me about graduate school and PhD studies which were more of the same. There was no point in this where he knew when to refuse, when to say no, when to call out the condescension and fakery of which he was presumably benefiting. In fact, he never saw himself as much of a beneficiary at all. He felt burdened by it all, and even robbed of what all the white kids faced: high expectations and the satisfaction of knowing that one climbed the ladder by virtue of his own efforts.

The story ends with his then appointment, which he knew to be fake at least on some level, though he believed that he truly did have something to contribute to university culture. It was that tag of having been marked by DEI that prevented it. He said he knew from childhood that in any endeavor in life, a title is easy but genuine respect from colleagues must be earned. He simply did not have that and did not know how to get it.

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Alberta Influencer launches site to report teachers pushing ideology in schools

After an Alberta teacher promoted a loophole using Edmonton Oilers Pride flags to circumvent Alberta legislation against pushing ideology in K-12 schools, social media influencer “Berta Proud Dad” has launched a way for parents and students to report instances of activist teachers breaking the law.

Lawrence Magee, who runs the social media handle Berta Proud Dad, spoke with Juno News about an initiative he started in response to parents coming to him about teachers rebelling against the elected provincial government’s efforts to prevent ideological indoctrination in schools.

Magee was alerted by parents to an Alberta teacher, Peter Mackay, who was urging other teachers to sneak pride flags into schools by exploiting an apparent loophole in the government’s efforts to remove political flags from classrooms under Bill 25.

The bill, which received royal assent on May 14, 2026, aims to ensure instruction is balanced and neutral rather than presenting a teacher’s personal political or ideological views as fact.

Mackay shared a post on Instagram pointing out that the directive to schools on which flags were permitted to be displayed includes sports flags. He endorsed using an Edmonton Oilers Pride flag to circumvent the effective ban on Pride flags in the classroom.

Magee noted that the ban is to remove all political ideology from the classroom, including Palestine flags, antifa stickers, and anything else not connected to the province or nation’s history.

In response, Magee launched reportateacher.ca for parents to report any teachers “not following the rules that the government set out in Bill 25.

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‘UK Has Fallen’: Sen. Cruz Mourns Britain Criminalizing Public For Memes

U.S. Republican Senator Ted Cruz has lamented the loss of liberty in the United Kingdom after a former police officer was convicted of a crime for merely reposting a meme mocking Islam.

The Newton Aycliffe magistrates’ court found retired police officer Stephen Gray guilty this month of violating Section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003 over a supposedly “grossly offensive” image he shared on his Facebook account.

The meme, which was flagged to the Durham Constabulary by a non-Muslim neighbour, portrayed a man wearing a turban next to a rasher of bacon with the caption: “Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

While Gray acknowledged that some may have found the meme in bad taste, he said he was shocked that it would result in a criminal conviction and a £1,000 fine.

Responding to a report on the case by Breitbart London, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) remarked: “No meme is criminal. The UK has fallen.”

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The Never-Ending Cycle Of Taking Offense…

Americans should not fear the past…

I remember the first time I came across a “trigger warning.”  I was on a university campus in the ‘90s, attending the first lecture of a new history professor.  As I perused her course syllabus, I was impressed with the reading list and organization.  Then I spotted an incongruous “warning” to women and African Americans suggesting that they might find some of the material offensive.  At first, I thought it was an inappropriate joke.  I asked someone about it, and I was informed that “trigger warnings” had become increasingly common in the classrooms of America’s elite boarding schools.  I rolled my eyes because I knew right then and there that it would take decades to remedy the problem.

The idea that a history professor would implicitly warn students to be afraid of the past unnerved me.  I had always believed very much the opposite — that it was important for young minds to face the past with open eyes.  As living members of the human race, we enjoy the great privilege of being able to learn as much from those who came before us as possible.  And a person can never learn too much about the past!  Whether you take the lessons of history with you to the battlefield, boardroom, small office, or kitchen table, understanding the people, events, and ideas that created today’s world is an invaluable tool for navigating the present and building the future.

I don’t want people to be afraid of the past.  I want them to be invigorated by it.  I want them to exercise their imaginations and step into the centuries that came before us.  I want them to understand the points of view of our ancestors and to appreciate everything that we have inherited from them.  Our role as the current custodians of this material world is not to judge previous generations by today’s mores and standards.  Our job is to prevent the great lessons of history from ever slipping through our grasp.  Sometimes, grappling with the past takes courage!

But the “trigger warning” was just the tip of a much bigger and more socially destructive iceberg.  The message on that syllabus was antithetical to personal growth.  It communicated three poisonous ideas: (1) History is terrifying.  (2) It’s okay to look away.  (3) It’s permissible to rewrite history if it makes us “feel” better.  None of these messages is true.  History is treasure.  Understanding the past is the only way of glimpsing the future.  And if a person understands that seeing into the future is priceless, then that person should similarly understand that learning from the past is priceless, too.  

Furthermore, I do not believe that we should be teaching children to be afraid.  Do we want them to learn that a hot stove burns skin?  Of course.  Should we then encourage them never to sit near a fire?  Absolutely not.  Courage is a virtue.  It comes only when we appreciate the dangers before us and move carefully around them anyway.  History is not there to scare us.  It can’t hurt us.  What it can do is inform us.  It can equip us with the wisdom and strength to ably meet the real challenges of this life.

Whether printed on classroom syllabi or repeated as some modern mantra of “political correctness,” “trigger warnings” exude cowardice.  Why must leftist politicians recite “land acknowledgments” before government meetings or solemnly intone, “Black lives matter,” during public speeches?  Why must they patronize the descendants of native tribes who were here before the Pilgrims?  Why do they insist on treating black Americans as if they were children? 

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‘Biology and science is offensive?’ Watch WNBA fans get ordered to conceal their XX-XY T-shirts

America’s well-known freedom speech, which actually protects even offensive language be, uhm, darned!

A security guard at a WNBA game between the Indiana Fever and the Atlanta Dream has imposed his own, and presumably the team’s, speech code on fans.

That is, that they are not allowed to have scientific facts emblazoned on their T-shirts. Cover up or begone, he orders.

It is in a report posted by Fox that the details appear:

The report explains Kasey Thomason and daughter Annie had tickets just two rows back from the court, and they chose to wear XX-XY Athletics T-shirt to support Sophie Cunningham “and the ongoing fight to keep women’s sports and spaces female.”

Through much of the action there was no difficulty.

Then overtime, and a security guard appeared. He ordered them to cover their shirts or leave.

The report explained the guard claimed that other “fan(s)” were offended so they could wear the Atlanta Dream “Wellness & Health Night” shirts or be taken out of the building by escort.

Kasey wondered, so “biology and science is offensive?”

Mother and daughter “reluctantly” agreed to put on the offered shirts so they didn’t miss the end of the game.

Then, the report pointed out, “the Thomasons are seen on the ESPN broadcast with the tan Dream shirts in hand. They can be seen talking to fans around them, who they said loved their shirts and showed support for them and Cunningham throughout the game.”

The report said the prohibited items at State Farm Arena include, “Clothing, garments or signs displaying explicit language, profanity or derogatory characterization towards any person(s).”

Fox reported, “If State Farm Arena and the Atlanta Dream were really trying to claim the shirts worn by the Thomasons were a ‘derogatory characterization’ or ‘indecent messages’ on clothing, that would be an arbitrary way of enforcing their rules, at best. Discrimination, at the worst. But the fact remains, the security guard didn’t claim any of these things from the prohibited items list or the Fan Code of Conduct. He just said the shirts were ‘offensive.'”

Kasey told Fox she assumes a “trans rights” promoter sitting at courtside had complained.

The Fox report said, “This whole situation is discriminatory, disgusting, and quite frankly, Orwellian. In no shape, manner, or form, is a shirt that displays four prominent letters, representing a biological truth that women have XX chromosomes and men have XY chromosomes, ‘offensive.'”

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