Robert Stacy McCain on bedlamite feminism: 

In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, [Shulamith Firestone] declared that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be… not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself.” Firestone called for “an end to the incest taboo, through abolition of the family,” so that “sexuality would be released from its straitjacket to eroticise our whole culture.” She flatly declared “pregnancy is barbaric,” described women as “the slave class,” and envisioned a “new society” in which “humanity could finally revert to its natural polymorphous sexuality — all forms of sexuality would be allowed and indulged.” The fact that Shulamith Firestone was clinically insane (a paranoid schizophrenic who died alone in 2012 at age 67) might serve as sufficient rebuttal to her doctrine, but by the time her madness became evident — she was committed to a psychiatric unit in 1987 — the radical movement she helped launch had gained a solid foothold in academia, publishing, law and politics.

David Clemens on academia’s Clown Quarter and its self-inflicted decline: 

The Modern Language Association is the world’s largest organisation for scholars of literature and languages with about 24,000 members in over 100 countries. Like the rest of academia, the MLA leans solidly to the left, yet it still includes a “Radical Caucus” and a leftist “Politics and the Profession” subgroup. One older gent from the Radical Caucus sports a hammer-and-sickle lapel pin; another member works to rehabilitate Joseph Stalin’s reputation… Is there anything more absurd than a handful of academics retailing their revolutionary fantasies in the Grand Ballroom of a luxury hotel?

Professor Clemens was a voice of reason in the excellent documentary Indoctrinate U. 

And David Hookstead spots more campus leftists signalling their brilliance to an unworthy world: 

An upcoming workshop scheduled to take place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison aims to teach campus radicals and socialists how to manipulate campus resources to advance their agenda… One of the group’s overall goals, according to their website, is to “reveal and challenge the North American university as a site working at the junction of settler-colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy and other systems of domination and exploitation.” The event includes sessions investigating what it means to be a thief, how to construct political narratives, and how to destabilise hegemonic spatial representations.

Given the costs of being a student whose time is spent engaged in pretentious Marxoid seething, and given how unlikely it is that such seething will attract employers or a salary, it may not surprise readers that the organisers are also very much opposed to “debt and hierarchies of knowledge.” Being expected to pay your bills as agreed – say, those misspent student loans – is, we learn, a “means of oppression.” Because destabilising hegemonic spatial representations is something that someone else should be forced to pay for.

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