Attention, citizens. A hate crime has been detected at Salisbury University:

The image, found April 10 on a whiteboard in Blackwell Library, showed a stick figure being hanged and labelled with a racial slur. Underneath was the hashtag “#whitepower.”

That’s this image here. 

After much wailing and fretting, and declarations of being “passionate about diversity and inclusion,” and after the involvement of police and the Wicomico County State’s Attorney’s Office, the white supremacist culprits have now been apprehended:

The university confirmed Tuesday, April 26, that the students involved in the incident were black.

Why, it’s almost as if fabricating racial animus were fashionable on campus. And of course beyond. 

In the pages of the Guardian, masculinity is once again being piously disdained. This time by Mr Grayson Perry, a part-time transvestite and maker of unattractive pottery: 

The Turner prize-winning artist has turned his sights on the survivalist [Bear Grylls] and his exceptionally rugged version of masculinity, arguing that it isn’t fit for the 21st century. “He celebrates a masculinity that is useless,” Perry said… Perry said that the masculine ideal presented by shows such as The Island, in which Grylls is currently putting a third group of hapless contestants through survivalist hell, is making it harder for men to successfully negotiate modern life. “Men might be good at taking the risk of stabbing someone or driving a car very fast, but when it comes to opening up, men are useless,” Perry told the Radio Times in an interview to promote his new series, All Man.

And then, because we haven’t had one in a while, a classic Guardian sentence:

“Masculinity is a decorative feature that is essentially counter-productive.”

Well, it’s true that rafting skills and urine-drinking may be niche concerns and of obvious practical use only to explorers, hardy outdoors types, and people whose package holidays have gone catastrophically wrong. But – and it’s quite a big one – there’s something to be said for seeing people in unfamiliar and rather trying circumstances achieving more – sometimes much more – than they thought they ever could. Which is both the premise and appeal of Mr Grylls’ various, quite popular TV programmes. However, showing people that they may be much more capable than they previously believed, resulting in a sense of great personal satisfaction, is apparently unimportant, a mere “hangover” from more primitive, less Guardian-friendly times.

Regarding the claim that masculinity is functionally obsolete and is now merely decorative, and at risk of seeming unkind, readers are invited to compare the mugshots of Mr Perry and Mr Grylls, these two contrasting expressions of modern masculinity, and ponder which is likely to attract the more widespread and vigorous sexual attention. Or indeed which of them might be more likely to prevail in a more hazardous physical exchange – say, an attempted mugging. And on the supposed uselessness of archetypal masculine skills, Mr Grylls’ lengthy television career, his extensive property portfolio, and his estimated annual earnings from UK merchandising alone of £3.3 million, rather speaks for itself.

Joshua Yasmeh on the travails of attempting to speak on a left-leaning campus: 

Ben Shapiro spoke to the students at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California, which purports to be a “Christian, liberal arts college.” Unfortunately, there was nothing “Christian” or “liberal” about the administration’s decision to censor all video coverage of Shapiro’s speech. Luckily, the ever-resourceful Shapiro decided go full MacGyver, evading the Orwellian police and streaming a live broadcast via Periscope with his own selfie stick.

The video, selfie stick and all, can be viewed here. 

Dave Huber on the public’s general preference for men’s sporting events over women’s: 

If you’re a sports fan (like me) who likes to watch the very best athletes engaged in the highest level of competition, then Daniela Brighenti’s article in the Yale Daily News won’t make a lot of sense to you. Desiring to watch the best sporting events, you see, is merely a “societal (and cultural) bias” against women.

And further to this farcical episode, the arrest of serial vandal and race-baiter Denzel McDonald has apparently caused uproar and searing mental trauma across campus, or at least among other pernicious little clowns in the University of Wisconsin’s Department of Afro-American Studies:

“We will be walking out of our classrooms to stand in solidarity with him and to organise against the anti-Black racism that has plagued our campus historically and contemporarily,” organisers state on Facebook. “We will be delivering our demands to the Chancellor and UWPD and need student support. We have to let them know that there are consequences for perpetuating white supremacy.”

Because when the police calmly and politely arrest a thug who’s wanted for threatening behaviour and 11 counts of vandalism, causing thousands of dollars of damage – specifically, by spraying deranged anti-white racist graffiti on campus walls – then this arrest somehow constitutes “white supremacy.” And the real victims here, apparently, are professors of Afro-American Studies – who, along with their students, are supposedly experiencing “a version of post-traumatic stress syndrome” and “a mental health crisis as serious as those following campus shootings or natural disasters.” 

Following his appearance at a “white privilege” conference, a white male sociologist corrects a small factual error – and is promptly denounced. 

You see, politely correcting a factual error – and thereby revealing an insinuation of “white supremacy” as absurd – is somehow proof of “defensiveness,” “white fragility,” and, by implication, latent white evil. 

Via Damian, who adds, “It doesn’t matter how actually correct you are; you will never appease the politically correct.” Quite. Because the drama, indignation and passive-aggressive spite must go on indefinitely. How else will people know their place in the egalitarian pecking order, and to whom they should defer, always and forever?

My whole life, I had struggled with patterns of behaviour and emotion that I knew were “bad,” but couldn’t seem to control. I lied compulsively about things that didn’t make sense. I was terrified of being abandoned, to the point that I became furiously, sometimes abusively, upset if I thought that my friends were hanging out without me. I was full of self-loathing and anger that I bottled up, and then released by self-injuring.   

Yes, we’re visiting the pages of Everyday Feminism. How could you tell? 

And, of course, I had grown up as a closeted trans girl of colour in a cis, white supremacist society.  

So far, so humdrum.

Ever since I could remember, I had been filled with rage and fear and self-loathing as a result of the constant messages that society, friends, and family sent me that said I was deviant, bad, wrong to the core.

A chronic rage that, we’re told, prompted some introspection, of a sort, and a peek inside a textbook on abnormal psychology:

My “symptoms” fit the profile of a mental disorder called Borderline Personality Disorder, a condition closely associated with psychopathy. It was, the textbook said, historically considered untreatable.

Oh, I’m sure lashings of strident feminism and identitarian seething will put that right in no time. No? The author of this cheerless tale, Ms Kai Cheng Thom, a “trans woman writer, poet and performance artist based in Montreal,” then goes on to bemoan the fact that “disorders like violent psychopathy” are “generally considered unlikeable,” possibly hazardous, “even in social circles that consider themselves progressive.” And that, while the public at large may be sympathetic towards people suffering clinical depression, “compassion for psychopaths, pathological liars, or narcissists” is, inexplicably, harder to come by. It’s all terribly unfair. Because incorrigible monsters bent on the manipulation and harm of others have feelings too: