Tag: political correctness

New Cal State policy bans professors from showing Native American artifacts in class

The California State University system has rolled out a new policy that prohibits professors from using Native American “cultural items” in class – unless they obtain permission from the tribe.

The policy, announced last week, drew criticism from a California anthropologist who described it as an “attack” on the preservation of knowledge. However, a campus free speech attorney praised CSU for dropping a section of the policy that restricted free speech.

The 23-campus system has been working on the revised policy for several years in connection to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, and California’s state version. The laws require government and public entities to restore human remains and “cultural items” to their direct descendants.

The policy, published July 1, outlines the method by which universities must identify and repatriate these items to Native American tribes.

“All CSU campuses must implement processes that ensure timely, lawful repatriation of Human Remains and Cultural Items, including respectful treatment and handling while in CSU custody,” the policy states.

It also requires campuses to “respect Native American traditional knowledge and cultural protocols, ensuring that no decisions are made without meaningful Tribal consultation.”

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Germany Is Not Being Honest About Who Is Assaulting Children At Swimming Pools

Migrants will not stop molesting and assaulting children at swimming pools in the best and most democratic Germany of all time…

In the last 10 years, we’ve welcomed a lot of ill-behaved and criminal young men into our country for no discernible reason, and along the way we’ve had the dubious privilege of discovering whole new categories of crime. There is the hostile-immigrant-drives-his-car-into-a-crowd-of-unsuspecting-innocents crime, there is the hostile-immigrant-stabs-a-bunch-of-random-people crime, there is the immigrant-gang-collectively-rape-underage-girl-in-park crime, and there is the immigrants-at-swimming-pool-molest-or-assault-various-children crime.

The latter has been stealing the headlines since the latest (allegedly carbon dioxide-induced) ‘heatwave’ in Germany. Recent stories include this one about a 25 year-old man of undisclosed background (who is almost certainly a migrant, otherwise authorities would not be so secretive about his origins) exposing himself to a bunch of underage teenagers at a pool in Asperg (Baden-Württemberg). Or this one, about a 21 year-old Syrian at a pool in Schweinfurt (Bavaria) caught exposing himself to four boys. Or this one, about men of “dark complexion” who severely beat an 18 year-old and threw him down some stairs. Or this disturbing one, about two Syrians who groped and assaulted a 12 year-old girl at a pool in Hof (Bavaria), forcing her beneath the water repeatedly and leaving her with a bloody nose.

Stories like this often come in groups, and what set off the present cascade was a particularly grim incident from June 22nd in Gelnhausen (Hessen), in which a group of Syrian migrants aged 18 to 28 molested eight or nine underage girls at the local pool. When the girls first complained about what was happening, pool personnel sent them back into the water. After this incident became a nationwide story, the Mayor of Gelnhausen, Christian Litzinger (CDU) gave an interview in which he appeared to ascribe the crime to “high temperatures”, which can cause “tempers to flare up”.

Naturally, this is but a partial list comprising only those news reports that I found, that anybody bothered to report to the police and that have made it into the press. The problem is vastly more pervasive than my brief summary might suggest. Personally, I haven’t been to a public pool in Germany in 10 years. I would never go again, and I would certainly never send my kids there. What used to be occasionally amusing places to get a bit of exercise have become crowded loci of urban chaos invariably full of drunken 20 year-old men from the global south. Everybody knows this is happening but it’s very politically incorrect to acknowledge that it’s happening, and so it’s become the occasion for a great deal of bizarre messaging from our progressive establishment.

A small group of peculiar lunatics have decided that what we really need to do is remind everybody that groping and assaulting and molesting is not okay. Thus we’ve been treated to an array of bizarre anti-swimming-pool-molestation messaging campaigns that just love to reverse the typical ethnicities of perpetrator and victim.

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North Carolina Democrat Governor Josh Stein VETOES Common Sense Bill Affirming Only TWO Genders — Chooses Radical Woke Ideology Over Basic Biology

North Carolina’s Democrat Governor Josh Stein has VETOED a bill that simply affirms what every sane American already knows: that there are only two genders — male and female.

The House Bill 805, passed by the state legislature, sought to “to officially recognize two sexes in North Carolina, to prevent the sexual exploitation of women and minors, to limit the use of state funding, to modify the law related to birth certificates, to modify the law related to civil remedies for gender transition procedures on non-minors, to allow students with religious objections to be excused from certain classroom discussions or activities, and to allow parent access to library books and to provide for restrictions on school sleeping quarters.”

But instead of standing with science and sanity, Governor Stein caved to the radical transgender lobby and vetoed the legislation on Thursday.

Stein said,

“The initial version of House Bill 805 protected people from being exploited on pornographic websites against their will. I strongly support that policy, which is a continuation of my work to protect children from sex abuse, modernize our sex crime statutes to address artificial intelligence, and eliminate the largest backlog of untested rape kits in the country. Instead of preventing sexual exploitation, the General Assembly chooses to engage in divisive, job-killing culture wars.

North Carolina has been down this road before, and it is a dead end. My faith teaches me that we are all children of God, no matter our differences, and that it is wrong to target vulnerable people, as this legislation does. I stand ready to work with the legislature when it gets serious about protecting people, instead of mean-spirited attempts to further divide us by marginalizing vulnerable North Carolinians.”

In addition to vetoing HB 805, Gov. Stein struck down three more bills targeting DEI initiatives: Senate Bill 227 (banning DEI in K–12 schools), Senate Bill 558 (eliminating DEI in public higher education), and House Bill 171 (prohibiting DEI positions and programs in state and local government).

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Germany: Muslim University Group Events Barred Amid Claims of Sex Segregation

A Muslim student organisation has been barred from holding any further events at Germany’s prestigious Charité University over accusations of segregating events by sex.

Medislam Collective, an Islamic student group, has been accused of violating the anti-discrimination policies of the Charité University of Medicine of Berlin after footage emerged of men and women being separated by their sex during a lecture.

The Medislam group had also reportedly held sex-specific events, including “Activity Day for Sisters” for female students and “Brothers Activity Day” for male students, Bild reported.

Other events included in-depth recitals of the Qur’an. It is currently unclear if the group mandated the segregation or if it was self-imposed by the students.

In a statement to the German paper, a Charité spokesman said that the university did not organise the previous events and that planned events have been barred during an official investigation.

“Based on the current indications and to ensure a non-discriminatory, inclusive and values-based Higher education space from now until further notice, and until further notice, the group will be prohibited from holding activities and events in the premises of the Charité,” the spokesman said.

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The Coward’s Bargain

Someone our family has known forever recently told my sister that they’ve been reading my Substack and that if they wrote the things I write, people would call them crazy. I got a kick out of that—not because it’s untrue, but because it reveals something darker about where we’ve ended up as a society. Most people are terrified of being themselves in public.

My sister’s response made me laugh: “People do call him crazy. He simply doesn’t care.” The funniest part is that I don’t even write the craziest stuff I research—just the stuff I can back up with sources and/or my own personal observations. I always try to stay rooted in logic, reason, and facts, though—I’m clear when I’m speculating and when I’m not.

This same guy has sent me dozens of private messages over the last 4 or 5 years challenging me on stuff I share online. I’ll respond with source material or common sense, and then—crickets. He disappears. If I say something he doesn’t want to hear, he vanishes like a child covering his ears. Over the last few years, I’ve been proven right about most of what we’ve argued about, and he’s been wrong. But it doesn’t matter—he’s got the memory of a gnat and the pattern never changes.

But he’d never make that challenge publicly, never risk being seen engaging with my arguments where others might witness the conversation. This kind of private curiosity paired with public silence is everywhere—people will engage with dangerous ideas in private but never risk being associated with them publicly. It’s part of that reflexive “That can’t be true” mindset that shuts down inquiry before it can even begin.

But he’s not alone. We’ve created a culture where wrongthink is policed so aggressively that even successful, powerful people whisper their doubts like they’re confessing crimes.

I was on a hike last year with a very prominent tech VC. He was telling me about his son’s football team—how their practices kept getting disrupted because their usual field on Randall’s Island was now being used to house migrants. He leaned in, almost whispering: “You know, I’m a liberal, but maybe the people complaining about immigration have a point.” Here’s a guy who invests mountains of money into companies that shape the world we live in, and he’s afraid to voice a mild concern about policy in broad daylight. Afraid of his own thoughts.

After I spoke out against vaccine mandates, a coworker told me he totally agreed with my position—but he was angry that I’d said it. When the company didn’t want to take a stand, I told them I would speak as an individual—on my own time, as a private citizen. He was pissed anyway. In fact, he was scolding me about the repercussions to the company. What’s maddening is that this same person had enthusiastically supported the business taking public stands on other, more politically fashionable causes over the years. Apparently, using your corporate voice was noble when it was fashionable. Speaking as a private citizen became dangerous when it wasn’t.

Another person told me that they agreed with me but wished they were “more successful like me” so they could afford to speak out. They had “too much to lose.” The preposterousness of this is staggering. Everyone who spoke out during Covid sacrificed—financially, reputationally, socially. I sacrificed plenty myself.

But I’m no victim. Far from it. Since I was a young man, I’ve never measured achievement by finance or status—my benchmark for being a so-called successful person was owning my own time. Ironically, getting myself canceled was actually a springboard to that. For the first time in my life, I felt I’d achieved time ownership. Whatever I’ve achieved came from being raised by loving parents, working hard, and having the spine to follow convictions rationally. Those attributes, coupled with some great fortune, are the reason for whatever success I’ve had—they’re not the reason I can speak now. Maybe this person should do some inward searching about why they’re not more established. Maybe it’s not about status at all. Maybe it’s about integrity.

This is the adult world we’ve built—one where courage is so rare that people mistake it for privilege, where speaking your mind is seen as a luxury only the privileged can afford, rather than a fundamental requirement for actually becoming established.

And this is the world we’re handing to our children.

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After All is Said and Done, American History is Human

The New York Time’s 1619 Project, a series of essays launched on August 18, 2019, sought to “reframe the country’s history” by placing slavery and the later prejudice that was indeed experienced by black Americans “at the very center of our national narrative.” Not electing our own leaders, not the Bill of Rights, not separation of powers. Racism, according to the 1619 Project authors and proponents, defines America’s origins.

In less than a year, the 1619 Project materials were transformed into a curriculum that was taught in 4,500 schools across the country. Since then, there have been national arguments over Critical Race Theory and DEI in schools. One group of professors conducted a survey in which they asked high school students how often they had heard certain phrases from their teachers. The study found that 36% of respondents said they heard the argument that “America is a fundamentally racist nation” often or almost daily.

This “America is fundamentally racist” view, in and of itself, is prejudiced. It labels our entire country because of the actions of a subgroup of people. So, should we wrap ourselves in the flag and avoid acknowledging the darker side of our history? Of course not. But the healthy response is not eternal and unending guilt; self-hate will not bring us any closer together as Americans.

The healthy response is to remind ourselves that we are human; some Americans humans held slaves and some freed slaves. Healing the nation is not about seeing only one side or the other, it is about seeing ourselves in our basic humanity. Author Jacob Needleman put it well in his book, The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders:

Like unregenerate man himself, America is both good and evil at the same time…When the real feeling, the deep sensing and pondering of each side of this contradiction begins to appear in us, something entirely new may be glimpsed in our hearts and in our actions. But, for that to happen, we first need to stand in front of each side of the contradiction without impatience and without helpless reactions of guilt or pride. We need to apprehend what is good in America, but without self-inflation, and what is evil in America, but without self-flagellation.

There is currently tremendous focus on the sins of slavery, so let’s ponder the other side, as Needleman suggests. Here are three early voices for the abolition of slavery, a very small sample of good people in colonial America.

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A Translation Guide To Progressive Slavespeak

I propose that we accompany physical detox with a verbal detox: we need to purge our bloated vocabulary of several concepts that are poisoning our understanding of ourselves and the world.

These concepts have been elaborated by people who would describe themselves as “self-aware,” “progressive,” and “liberated,” but they are actually terms more fit for a society of slaves than a society of free persons. Indeed, these concepts, at least as they are typically employed by “progressives,” could be described, without exaggeration, as a species of slavespeak. By this, I simply mean that they are used disingenuously, to rationalise political oppression and slavery.

Let’s name them and shame them, one by one:

  1. Misinformation/disinformation: On its face, this means false or misleading information that could be harmful to citizens. But in slavespeak, while it parades under this apparently innocent meaning, it actually means information that some individuals find disagreeable or inconvenient, and therefore want censored or banished from the public square.
  2. Far right: On its face, this means political positions that border on the insane, the pathological, and the irrational, and have violent and oppressive tendencies, with affinities to Nazism, white supremacism, and other dodgy political movements. In slavespeak, “far right” retains these connotations, but the term is applied arbitrarily to any position that disrupts the official narrative of the political Establishment.
  3. Xenophobia: Xenophobia usually means blanket dislike or prejudice against foreigners. But in slavespeak, xenophobia is applied to anyone who affirms the value of national ties or national identity, defends the idea that immigrants should adapt to the their host culture, or dissents from open border policies.
  4. Hate speech: On its face, this means speech that targets particular groups in society with vitriolic language and insults of various sorts, seeking to portray such groups as intrinsically detestable. In slavespeak, hate speech just means any strongly worded discourse that dares to speak critically of any protected cohort of society or its behaviour or opinions. So heated political discourse is treated as insidious hate speech, especially discourse that threatens the reigning ideology.
  5. Tolerance: On its face, this means a disposition to peacefully put up with people, behaviour, or opinions one finds abhorrent or offensive. In slavespeak, tolerance means the uncritical celebration of every conceivable lifestyle under the sun, the anaesthesisation of one’s critical faculties. So verbally expressing disapproval or criticism toward a way of life, which used to be permitted by freedom of expression, is now condemned as intolerance.

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Not Parody: Socialist NYC Mayoral Candidate Lectures Billionaire About How DEI Is Good for Business

As if the Democrat Party — which still hasn’t recovered from the decisive beatdown it suffered at the hands of President Donald Trump in the 2024 election — wasn’t already in a self-inflicted free fall, recent events have only accelerated the decline.

First, Trump’s successful attack on key Iranian nuclear sites, which Democrats frantically continue to downplay (lie about), was a “yuuge,” (as Trump might say) setback for the TDS-riddled among us. 

Then, Zohran Mamdani, the so-called “Democratic Socialist” candidate for mayor of New York City, bested former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Tuesday’s Democrat primary. Given the demographics of NYC, Mamdani is the hands-down favorite to become the Big Apple’s next mayor. 

Incidentally, I wonder if Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson might soon become the second-worst mayor in America, but I digress.

Anyway, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is among those who fear for the future of NYC, often dubbed “the financial center of the world,” given Mamdani’s socialist positions. Ackman posted an extensive missive on X (formerly, Twitter) on Thursday, in which he shared his concerns about Mamdani. Ackman wrote, in part (emphasis, mine):

I awoke this morning gravely concerned about New York City. I thought “What has NYC become that an avowed socialist who has supported defunding the police, whose solution to lowering food prices is city-owned supermarkets, who doesn’t understand that freezing rents will only reduce the supply of housing, who has no experience managing an organization — let alone a city with a $100+ billion budget and a $2 trillion economy — and who believes chants for ‘Globalizing the Intifada’ are acceptable, wins the Democratic Primary.

After speaking with those supported @ZohranKMamdani, I believe that he won the primary largely not due to his policies, but rather because he is a superb politician who ran a remarkable and inspiring campaign. He is intelligent and articulate. He is young and charming, and he successfully played down incriminating @X posts and statements from his past, pitching a joyful campaign of unity.

Isn’t that — the bolded passage — always what wins elections for Democrats? Think about it. 

For example, Barack Obama soared into the presidency on January 20, 2009, after having declared at the 2004 Democratic National Convention: “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America.” Yet, when Obama became president, he set about dividing America on class and racial bases for eight years — and then some. 

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Rep. Brandon Gill Embarasses Racist ‘DEI Expert’ With a Few Simple Questions During Testy Hearing

Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) is fast emerging as one of the brightest young stars of the Republican Party with a series of star-turning performances at congressional hearings.

On Wednesday, he displayed this talent while facing off against a so-called “DEI expert” named Dr. Shaun Harper during a congressional hearing called “Sacrificing Excellence for Ideology: The Real Cost of DEI.”

Harper is a University of Southern California professor who specializes in research focused on racial and gender equity and inclusion, according to his school biography. Naturally, he served as the House Democrats’ witness during the hearing.

Gill immediately sought to expose Harper as a complete fraud by asking a handful of simple questions that someone with his experience should be able to answer without issue.

These included:

Do you believe America should be a color-blind society?

Should race be considered in employment practices?

Which race should be preferred in hiring practices?

Harper failed to properly answer these questions once and was left stumped completely at one point. Due to this, Gill was able to make a complete mockery of the witness and the whole racist practice of DEI.

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DOJ Probes University Of California Over Alleged Race And Sex Hiring Quotas

The Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation into the University of California (UC) system to determine whether its efforts to boost faculty diversity run afoul of federal anti-discrimination laws.

In a June 26 announcement, the Department of Justice (DOJ) stated that it is probing whether the university’s “UC 2030 Capacity Plan” and related campus-level programs constitute a pattern or practice of unlawful employment discrimination based on race and sex, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

“Public employers are bound by federal laws that prohibit racial and other employment discrimination,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division. “Institutional directives that use race- and sex-based hiring practices expose employers to legal risk under federal law.”

According to the Justice Department, the UC system’s strategic hiring plan explicitly encourages campuses to measure and increase the number of new hires by race and sex to meet internal diversity targets. Officials described the framework as potentially unlawful, citing provisions in the plan that direct campuses to recruit “diverse” faculty in line with demographic benchmarks.

The UC 2030 Capacity Plan outlines several such goals, including the recruitment of at least 40 percent of its graduate students from its own undergraduate programs and from other minority-serving institutions, including Hispanic-serving institutions, historically black colleges and universities, and tribal colleges and universities. The plan also outlines a goal to hire more than 1,100 new ladder-rank faculty members by 2030—an effort the university says will help diversify its academic workforce, noting that new hires tend to be more diverse than the existing faculty.

“Identity-based hiring is not only wrong—it is illegal,” Dhillon wrote in a post on social media. “Public employers ignore our civil rights laws at their peril.”

A request for comment sent to the University of California by The Epoch Times was not immediately returned.

A university spokesperson told The Hill that the university “is committed to fair and lawful processes in all of our programs and activities, consistent with federal and state anti-discrimination laws.”

“The University also aims to foster a campus environment where everyone is welcomed and supported. We will work in good faith with the Department of Justice as it conducts its investigation,” the spokesperson said.

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