Timothy Snyder, a Yale history professor, took to Twitter in early September to claim that COVID-19 is a “lazy man’s” ethnic cleansing.
In the Twitter thread, Snyder first tweeted, “Coronavirus in America: A lazy man’s ethnic cleansing #OurMalady #TrumpGenocide #TrumpLiedPeopleDied #TrumpKilledAmericans Kushner’s team: “because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically.”
Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University (CWRU), the site of last night’s Presidential debate has set up dedicated ‘support spaces’ for students who have been triggered by the tense exchange.
For any poor snowflake babies who couldn’t handle the nasty orange man telling Joe Biden “There’s nothing smart about you,” CWRU is providing a “confidential safe space” where they can talk and cry about it.
The University says “students can discuss the impact of recent national events, including the presidential debate and upcoming election.”
There are eight “presidential debate support spaces” available for students to attend, according to the university which asks that everybody use “respectful dialogue.”
The spaces will remain active from Monday through to next Friday, for ‘virtual counselling sessions’.
The university announced that the “Support Space is not a substitute for psychotherapy and does not constitute mental health treatment.”
The spaces are a throwback to 2016 when education centers offered counseling after Trump won the election.
Ted Grudin, who earned his Ph.D. in environmental science from the University of California-Berkeley, wrote an op-ed in the Earth Island Journal last week titled, “How White Supremacy Caused the Climate Crisis.”
In the op-ed, Grudin asserted that “embedded in the theory of racial supremacy is the theory of human supremacy over nature, which has brought environmental calamity upon us.”
As Grudin sees it, white supremacy thrives on the “accumulation of wealth and power” of a select few, namely Caucasians, and the “oppression and destruction” of everyone and everything else. White people, he argued, have historically believed that dominance and control are their “natural rights” and have thus sought to “colonize peoples and lands.”
The University of Edinburgh in Scotland announced that it would rename a university building after George Floyd on Thursday. The Hume Tower was previously named after Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, who is thought of as a notable classical liberal political philosopher.
The Hume Tower will now be known as 40 George Floyd. The prestigious university, located in Scotland’s capital city, explained in a statement that the renaming was taking place because “of the sensitivities around asking students to use a building named after the 18th century philosopher whose comments on matters of race, though not uncommon at the time, rightly cause distress today.”
Many of Hume’s ideas and publications had influenced the American Revolution and later European movements against absolute monarchy.
The University of Edinburgh claims that the strange renaming is only temporary, but give no timeframe as to when the tower will be reverted to its original name, or changed back at all. They’re probably setting up some clueless, feckless university administrator to back down in the face of militant liberal activists who demand that the Floyd name be honored in perpetuity.
The statement is wrong on a number of levels. There is no question the Constitution did not end our deeply shameful history of slavery. However, even with the Declaration of Independence figures like John Adams and Thomas Jefferson sought to address slavery. The decision was made to accommodate slave states to secure the Declaration. The same political calculus was behind the infamous the Three-Fifths Compromise found in Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution.
Thus, the Constitution did indeed perpetuate and protect the institution of slavery with its inherent white supremacy values. However, that was not the “design” of the Constitution. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a fight over representation and taxation. The decision to leave slavery unaddressed was based on the same political expediency. It was wrong. It is no excuse to secure the independence of most citizens at the cost of leaving enslaved others. It was and remains the original sin of our nation. The design of our Constitution should have guaranteed freedom from all men and women.
Yet, the actual design of the Constitution was the Madisonian vision of shared and limited government. It was founded on the philosophical work of figures ranging from John Locke to Montesquieu. The assertion that the design was to perpetuate slavery is revisionist and wrong.
University of Rhode Island Professor Erik Loomis appeared to defend the murder of Aaron “Jay” Danielson, the member of the right-wing group Patriot Prayer, during recent social unrest in Portland, Oregon.
In 2012, Loomis came under scrutiny after he called for NRA executive Wayne LaPierre’s “head on a stick“ following the shooting massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut.
Just weeks later, in January 2013, Loomis said, “I know the central mission of the Republican Party is to have a membership made up entirely of old rural white people.”
Now, Loomis is once again under fire after publishing a blog post titled “Why was Michael Reinoehl killed?” Reinoehl is the man suspected of fatally shooting Danielson. Reinoehl was killed as federal authorities tried to arrest him.
“Michael Reinoehl is the guy who killed the fascist in Portland last week. He admitted it and said he was scared the cops would kill him. Well, now the cops have killed him,” Loomis wrote in the September 4 blog post.
“I am extremely anti-conspiracy theory. But it’s not a conspiracy theory at this point in time to wonder if the cops simply murdered him. The police is [sic] shot through with fascists from stem to stern. They were openly working with the fascists in Portland, as they were in Kenosha which led to dead protestors,” Loomis continued.
In the comment section of the blog post, one reader challenged Loomis by writing, “Erik, he shot and killed a guy,” referring to Reinoehl.
Loomis responded by saying, “He killed a fascist. I see nothing wrong with it, at least from a moral perspective.” He further added that “tactically, that’s a different story. But you could say the same thing about John Brown.”
Loomis furthered compared Reinoehl to Brown who in the 1800s used violence as a means of fighting slavery.
One reader then asked, “What’s so great about assassinating a rando fascist? And in the absence of a sound affirmative justification, it should be easy to envision the drawbacks.”
Loomis was quick to reply with, “What’s so great about assassinating random slaveholders, said liberals to John Brown.”
In a separate comment, Loomis wrote, “the problem with violence is that it usually, though not always, is a bad idea. That I agree with.”
Loomis said in another comment, “Yes, sometimes violence is necessary, say to avoid greater physical harm, i.e. self-defense, or to defeat a literal army of fascists who are trying to kill people. But, ideologically, I think the idea that violence is good if it’s against our political enemies is a core part of fascism, and so the ideological opposition to that idea should be its opposite – that violence as a general rule is bad, unless the specific context of that situation requires a violent response.”
A public college in New York City is offering an undergraduate class called the “Abolition of Whiteness,” adding to what critics say is a growing number of courses aimed at the study of “whiteness” at colleges and universities around the country.
Hunter College — a public school in Manhattan that is part of the City University of New York — is advertising a course in its Fall 2017 catalog that examines “how whiteness – and/or white supremacy and violence – is intertwined with conceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, body ability, nationality, and age.”
The “Abolition of Whiteness,” taught by Prof. Jennifer Gaboury, can be taken as either a women and gender studies course or a political science class, according to the school’s online course catalog.
Greg Patton is a professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California. During a recent virtual classroom session, he was discussing public speaking patterns and the filler words that people use to space out their ideas: um, er, etc. Patton mentioned that the Chinese often use a word that is pronounced like nega.
“In China the common word is ‘that, that that that,’ so in China it might be ‘nega, nega, nega, nega,'” Patton explained to his class. “So there’s different words you’ll hear in different cultures, but they’re vocal disfluencies.”
But because the Chinese word nega sounds like nigger, some students were offended and reported the matter to the administration. Patton is now suspended, according to Campus Reform:
On Tuesday evening, the USC Marshall School of Business provided Campus Reform with a statement, confirming that Patton is no longer teaching his course.
“Recently, a USC faculty member during class used a Chinese word that sounds similar to a racial slur in English. We acknowledge the historical, cultural and harmful impact of racist language,” the statement read.
Patton “agreed to take a short term pause while we are reviewing to better understand the situation and to take any appropriate next steps.”
Another instructor is temporarily teaching the class.
USC is now “offering supportive measures to any student, faculty, or staff member who requests assistance.” The school is “committed to building a culture of respect and dignity where all members of our community can feel safe, supported, and can thrive.”
This is ridiculous. It seems clear that Patton did not mean to harm anyone, and that the point he was making was perfectly valid. The resemblance between these two words is purely coincidental, and adults should be perfectly capable of hearing the Chinese version without fainting in front of their computer screens. Anyone who is this prepared to be bothered all the time needs to turn down their outrage dial.
“I’ll say this ten thousand times, but if anyone thinks they’re helping the cause of racial equality by engaging in absurd, over-the-top speech policing of innocent people, then they’re sadly mistaken,” wrote The Dispatch‘s David French.
Hellbound and Down 
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