She chose to share, and thereby impress. Pronouns, obviously.

Update, via the comments:

Given Ms Vilkomerson’s ostentatiously woke outpourings elsewhere, I think we can assume that, whether true or fabricated, said tweet was intended to both amuse and be met with approval. A bit of peer-group positioning, The key part being the modish dismissal of “white boys.” (Sort of, “See, I’ve taught my daughter to disdain whiteness and masculinity. How brave I am.”) That said tweet conveys other things, and unintended ironies, seems to have escaped Ms Vilkomerson.

As public boasts go, it’s quite a strange thing. I mean, you can imagine a proud parent announcing that their fourteen-year-old had passed a chemistry exam or reached piano grade three or something. But wanting to announce that your fourteen-year-old has internalised pretentious disdain for white people, and white men in particular, seems… obnoxiously unhinged. That this is apparently something statusful, a basis for applause, or at least in-group belonging, does not make it seem less so.

Via Rafi.

Robert Murphy on the pathologies of the leftist campus:   

This is not a matter of “Oh, gee, there’s a bunch of people who have different views about whether health insurance should be provided by the government.” That’s not what I’m talking about. [These are people whose reaction is,] “Oh, there’s a speaker coming to campus and we don’t like that person’s views. We are going to credibly threaten that we will break stuff and hurt people, we will set things on fire and smash windows.” And so, then the school has to cancel because of security concerns. And then that gets spun as “Oh yeah, the reason that speaker couldn’t come here is because he would incite violence.” The kind of mindset that would do that and would see nothing weird about that. “Yeah, the reason the speaker can’t come here is because he promotes violence – by us, his enemies.” 

Which rather calls to mind the tenderly whispered wife-beater’s lament: “Don’t make me hurt you, baby.”

Needless to say, examples abound. And do note the role of their academic enablers.

Cathy Young on Lenin and his admirers: 

Many leftists in places like Jacobin magazine see Lenin as the “good communist” to Joseph Stalin’s “bad communist” — the revolutionary wrongly maligned as an authoritarian. Indeed, Lenin’s birthday this year was marked on Twitter by New York State Senator Julia Salazar, a member of the new crop of young progressive politicians. The “Lenin good, Stalin bad” formula was also popular among Soviet reformers, both in the late 1950s-early 1960s and in the late 1980s. It was wrong then; it is wrong now… As independent Russian historian Nikita Sokolov recently told Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, Lenin’s only consistent position throughout his political career was that “he was a fundamental believer in violence as the solution to any problem.” 

Based on history, and their own writings, it seems entirely possible that devotees of Marxoid fantasy typically start with the ideal of violence and coercion, the titillating rewards of having power over others, and then work backwards in search of a pretext.

Oh, and Dr Jennifer Cassidy is an Oxford University politics lecturer who has thoughts on what kind of books you’re allowed to have on your shelves.

Again, via Darleen in the comments:

It’s as if the movie Inherit the Wind had a different ending.

She’s referring to this intriguing academic development: 

Instructors at a prominent university in Australia have been warned not to lecture on the natural historical record of that country; instead, they should teach a creation narrative regarding the origin of indigenous Australian people. Lecturers at the University of New South Wales “have been warned off making the familiar statement in class that ‘Aboriginal people have been in Australia for 40,000 years’,” The Australian reports. Instead, they should state that “Aborigines have been here ‘since the beginning of the Dreaming/s’ because this ‘reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land’.”

It seems we’ve gone from “The aboriginal population is primitive and unable to think rationally about things,” which is a sentiment to be denounced, especially in academia, and progressed to “We must treat the aboriginal population as if it were primitive and unable to think rationally about things.” Which, apparently, is something to be applauded. Especially in academia.

In the video below, Janice Fiamengo reports on recent events at the University of Chicago, where Rachel Fulton Brown, a professor of Medieval history, dared to suggest, briefly, that, as a notional group, white men aren’t entirely awful, and that Western civilisation isn’t wholly without merit. The professor has consequently been denounced by her peers as a “fascist white supremacist” and a “violent” menace to the wellbeing of anyone whose skin is heroically brown. And do note the number – 1,300, cited towards the end of the video – the significance of which will, I think, become apparent.

Mark Bauerlein on Jordan Peterson and the hive-mind media: 

These cases typify what we might call the Peterson Effect. Peterson brings social science findings to bear on thorny matters of men and women. Those findings run against the progressive goal of eliminating male-female differences. The journalists are unaware of the science, but they are steeped in [progressive] ideology. It’s an obdurate mix of ignorance and certainty.

As we’ve seen, more than once. And which may in part explain why Peterson’s interviews often strike a chord with a wider public, in that they tend to reveal an eerie uniformity of assumptions and begged questions, and vanities, among the media class. 

Heather Mac Donald on “diversity” and dishonesty: 

Every remotely selective college is desperate to admit as many underrepresented minorities as possible, and brags openly about its diverse student body in marketing literature. Application forms solicit students’ racial identity not to exclude underrepresented minorities, but to favour them… Far from being a handicap, being black or Hispanic is usually worth at least a standard deviation in test scores and GPA in admission to selective colleges… At Harvard, test scores and a GPA that would give an Asian-American applicant only a 25 percent chance of admission provide a 95 percent admission guarantee to a black high school senior, according to data in an ongoing discrimination lawsuit against the university.

Victor Davis Hanson on calculations of “white privilege”: 

[In the world of “diversity,”] politics had something to do with skin colour, but how and why was inferred rather than defined. If a white-looking second-generation Arab American put on a head scarf and declaimed against U.S. policy, and if she had a name that was clearly not European in origin, then she too was a “minority” and could advance claims against “white privilege.” But should she dress in assimilated fashion and voice support for the state of Israel, then she probably possessed “white privilege” and joined the victimisers rather than the victims.

And Matthew Blackwell on the megalomaniacal horrors of the Khmer Rouge: