Kyle Smith on what happens when you question the accuracy of a race-activist theatre production: 

Steppenwolf Theatre Company charged [critic Hedy Weiss] with “deep-seated bigotry.” An actor named Bear Bellinger announced that he would not perform if Weiss showed up at a workshop production he was appearing in. An ad hoc coalition that might as well have dubbed itself the Blackball Hedy Movement (but is actually called the Chicago Theatre Accountability Coalition) launched a petition via change.org to organise the theatre world of Chicago against Weiss by denying her invitations to its plays. Several theatre organisations have publicly agreed to join the blackballing effort, and dozens have offered noncommittal statements of support. The group’s broadside against Weiss reads, “Over the last few years especially, we have joined together to make it clear that inappropriate language or behaviour does not have a place within our community, and that prejudice of any kind will not stand.”

I’ll let you find out for yourselves what was deemed to constitute “bigotry” and “inappropriate language.”

Tim Newman spots a pattern: 

I suppose Nigeria and the UK are not the only countries where the wealthy and privileged get together and pretend they’re on the side of the downtrodden masses, but I am nevertheless surprised at how universal such delusions are.

Jim Goad catalogues more examples of leftist high-mindedness: 

It happened amid an insane cultural climate where the day before James Hodgkinson’s rampage, a black male shooter in Indianapolis fired at a truck that was flying a “Make America Great Again” flag. Where on June 11, the Huffington Post ran an article that openly called for Donald Trump and “everyone assisting in his agenda” to be tried for treason and publicly executed. Where a successful TV producer can encourage Trump-haters to “pick up a goddamn brick,” and he doesn’t get fired. Where a college professor says that Republicans “should be lined up and shot,” and he doesn’t get fired, either… A climate where the left is so egregiously insane and bloodthirsty — all in the name of compassion, of course — that the incomparably wormy Jesse Benn, who has previously called for “white wounding” and for violence against Trump supporters, saw no problem with a fellow traveller “shooting a racist lawmaker in the hip” last Wednesday. It’s a climate where, after the shooting, an obese New Jersey Democrat openly calls for the murder of Republicans with the hashtags #HuntRepublicans and #HuntRepublicanCongressmen.

Oh, and trans activist and self-declared “insatiable researcher” Zinnia Jones struggles to apprehend certain aspects of reality: 

Pretty sure they were trying to keep them from jumping.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

Katherine Kersten on racial discipline quotas in schools – and their ugly consequences:

On [superintendent Valeria] Silva’s watch, the city’s high schools have become menacing places where gangs of out-of-control teens prowl the halls, and “classroom invasions” by students settling private disputes are commonplace. Today, fights that “might have been between two individuals” can grow into “mêlées involving up to 40 or 50 people,” according to Steve Linders, a St Paul police spokesman. Roving packs often attack individuals, and police have had to use chemical irritants to break up what they call “riots.” […] One high school has issued emergency whistles to teachers and assigned a guard to every floor. A teacher who was crushed into a shelf in a classroom invasion now instructs her students to use a “secret knock” to enter her classroom.

The discipline policies that gave rise to this chaos sprang from Silva’s embrace of “racial equity” ideology. In St Paul, as across the nation, black students as a group are referred for discipline at higher rates than their peers. Silva made eliminating this racial gap a top priority. In Silva’s view, the gap is caused by teachers’ racial bias and cultural insensitivity, not by higher rates of misconduct by black students. She mandated “white privilege” training for all district personnel, eliminated “continual wilful disobedience” as a suspendable offence, and shifted many special education students with behaviour problems — students who are disproportionately black — to mainstream classrooms.

As Silva’s new discipline regime took hold, reading and math scores dropped and headlines about assaults on teachers appeared with disturbing frequency. Yet instead of reconsidering, her administration moved quickly to control public relations damage. For example, district officials attempted to silence critics by accusing them of having “issues with racial equity,” one veteran teacher told City Pages. In December 2015, teachers threatened to strike over mounting safety concerns… Meanwhile, St Paul families of all races began flooding into charter and suburban public schools, taking millions of dollars in state aid with them.

What’s remarkable here isn’t that young thugs and budding sociopaths will quickly exploit immunity from punishment based solely on their race, but the fact that grown adults, supposed professionals, many of whom will be parents, either didn’t see this coming or realised what would happen and went ahead anyway, thereby screwing everyone else. Including, of course, children with browner skin who somehow manage not to indulge in routine fits of thuggery.

Readers may recall this rather startling article by Paul Sperry on how similar policies of racial favouritism in six other cities promptly resulted in six surges in violent classroom assaults. With apologists for the policies in effect claiming that “African-American boys” are more “physical” and “demonstrative,” and just can’t help punching teachers in the face, or groping them, or setting other students’ hair on fire. Because it’s how black Americans “engage in learning.”

Also relevant, the first item here and the links immediately following it.

Heather Mac Donald on the world’s real unsafe spaces: 

Because Albinos’ body parts are believed to carry magical powers, their limbs are highly marketable — once obtained, of course, through mutilation or murder. Attending school for sisters Bibiana and Tindi Mashamba was a nightmare; not only did other children throw rocks and spit on them and teachers beat them, but the threat of murder was ever-present. So, like many Third World girls, they simply stayed home. But even such a retreat from the public realm couldn’t protect them. The day after their father’s funeral, Bibiana’s leg and two fingers were hacked off in the hope of a lucrative sale.

Good Samaritans brought the girls to the Orthopaedic Institute for Children in Los Angeles so as to provide Bibiana with a new prosthetic leg. And then students from USC’s law school started an asylum appeal for them. Did those law students seek to get them asylum in Nigeria, say, or Haiti, so that they wouldn’t be oppressed by white privilege? No, oddly, they targeted their asylum petition at the U.S. government, the place where victims of the brutality, superstition, and hatred that characterise so many Third World countries flee to (along with equally reviled Western Europe). The petition was successful, and now Bibiana and Tindi are students in Ojai, California, where they are eager to catch up on their lost schooling and go on to college. There are no reports as of yet of the girls being stoned in Ojai.

Seth Barron on the unmentionable costs of illegal immigration: 

New York’s Health + Hospitals Corporation, which runs the city’s massive public health infrastructure, takes it as its mission to provide care to anyone who needs it, without regard for immigration status. This policy is a major reason why HHC is on constant verge of financial collapse. During the last fiscal year, HHC needed an emergency allocation of $337 million from the city [i.e., taxpayers] just to keep its doors open, and the prognosis for the future is even worse. At an April press conference, Dr Ram Raju, president of HHC, said that caring for illegals consumes about one-third of his $7.6 billion annual budget. Rounding down, that means that $2.5 billion — of which the city is picking up an increasingly large chunk every year, as state and federal aid dries up — goes toward providing health care to illegal aliens in New York.

And Cathy Young on the alleged gender politics of headphone use:  

Back in 2013, Dan Bacon posted a piece titled “How to Talk to a Woman Who Is Wearing Headphones.” This three-year-old blogpost was dug up and pilloried by a Twitter activist named Brandon Evers, whose Twitter bio states, “I support intersectional feminism, but only women can decide if I’m a feminist” and helpfully clarifies that his personal pronouns are “he/him,” and whose Twitter feed is mostly one long exercise in ‘look how progressive and pro-feminist I am’ moral posturing. Brandon’s tweet quickly went viral with 18,000 retweets, and the outrage machine kicked in, with Bustle, Slate, and numerous other sites denouncing [Bacon’s] post as a creepy and misogynistic call to sexual harassment and boundary violation. Revelist, a publication for millennial women, compared Dan Bacon to mass murderer Elliott Rodger, who killed six people (four of them men) in 2014 because he was mad about being rejected by women.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Heather Mac Donald on race hustlers and riots: 

For the last two years, President Barack Obama has seized every opportunity to advise blacks that they are the victims of a racist criminal justice system. We should not be surprised when that belief, so constantly inflamed, erupts into violence. Even in his remarks at the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas cops, Obama had the gall to trot out his usual racial vendetta against the police, even though he was fully on notice that cops were being killed because of it… Obama’s indictment ignored, as usual, the astronomically higher rates of black crime that fully explain racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Meanwhile, Obama hasn’t uttered a word in condemnation of the lawless behaviour in Milwaukee, two days into the events. […]

And as important as the political stoking of that hatred is the academic race industry that keeps black victimology at a fever pitch. The 2015–2016 school year saw an outbreak of delusional self-pity among black college students across the country. They claimed to be discriminated against by faculty, administrators, fellow students, and academic standards. Never mind that many allegedly disparaged students were attending the colleges in question only because of racial preferences, despite having test scores that would automatically disqualify white or Asian applicants. Never mind that nearly every waking hour of a college administrator is devoted to the cultivation of a separatist racial consciousness among black students and to dreaming up new racial sinecures for faculty and other administrators.

For an example of that victimology, and the behaviour being excused by faculty and staff, see this surreal episode. Note the impunity and inversion of reality. And note the description, by the university’s vice provost for student affairs, of blatant racial thuggery as “a wonderful, beautiful thing.”

Theodore Dalrymple on intellectual evasions: 

Sometimes the employment of a single word in common use gives away an entire worldview. There was just such a usage in the headline of a story in the Guardian late last month: “How the ‘Pompey Lads’ fell into the hands of Isis.” […] The word that implied a whole worldview was “fell.” According to the headline, the young men “fell” into the hands of Isis as an apple falls passively to the ground by gravitational force. The word suggests that it could have happened to anybody, this going to Syria via Turkey to join a movement that delights in decapitation and other such activities in the name of a religion — their religion. Joining Isis is like multiple sclerosis; it’s something that just happens to people. The word “fell” denies agency to the young men, as if they had no choice in the matter. They were victims of circumstance by virtue of their membership of a minority, for minorities are by definition victims without agency.

Mick Hartley quotes Anne Applebaum on the new titan of the British left: 

Jeremy Corbyn, would-be leader of the Labour party, is the latest in a long line of useful idiots. Corbyn has recommended that his Twitter followers watch the Russian propaganda channel Russia Today, which he has described as “more objective” than other channels. Never mind that Russia Today interviews actors who claim to be “witnesses” and invents stories — for example, that a Russian-speaking child was crucified by a Ukrainian.

When not describing Hamas and Hizballah as “friends” and declaring his “solidarity” with the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela, our Islington radical finds time to be a fearless supporter of taxpayer-funded homeopathy, which apparently “compliments ‘conventional’ medicine” because “they both come from organic matter.” 

And Tim Blair ponders the cultural and economic powerhouse that is taxpayer-funded interpretive dance: 

As Australia transitions from a mineral export-based economy to a dance-based economy, it is clearly important to make certain that the dance sector is as stable as possible. Choreographer Lucy Guerin told the [senate] hearings [into arts funding] that to do otherwise would risk us “eventually severing the future of artistic development in Australia and setting us back 30 years.” “It’s that serious,” she added, with all the gravity you’d expect from a choreographer addressing a bunch of senators.

Behold ye, wealth creation.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.