Joe Simonson on the latest innovation in anti-Trump “resistance”: 

Just Nips [are] the “official nipples of The Resistance movement,” according to founder Molly Borman. Started last January in time for the Women’s March, Just Nips provides synthetic nipples that you can wear over your bra or over your nipples. The product “cements the idea that women can and should do whatever they want,” Borman told me over the phone. In this case, “whatever they want” means making random people in public think you’re not wearing a bra — for empowerment or something. Just Nips’ release date is no coincidence. Borman sees her product as a direct challenge to President Trump’s administration. According to Borman, “a lot of women feel unsafe” under Trump, and her product helps provide comfort and “a safe space.”

Apparently, they’re “the WMDs of nipple erectors.” 

Sarah Hoyt on processed youth:

I don’t know who coined “Reeeee” for the sound progressives make when in the middle of a scream fest about some – mostly imaginary and unintended – offence. I know that for several months now my friends have been using it, usually when just having dealt with some idiot who keeps yammering on about moon ferrets. Or patriarchy. Or white supremacy… Thing is, if you’ve read about the Cultural Revolution… those too were a bunch of ignorant kids, taught only Maoism, and completely ignorant of what the peasants needed to do to survive and grow food. Their advice, their demands, their theories, were not only stupid but actually life-threatening. But people had to follow it because otherwise they’d be denounced and held up before revolutionary tribunals… The people who destroyed Chinese culture and productivity in the Cultural Revolution, and who filled the Yellow River with so many bodies that they washed up en masse on the shores of Macao (where my dad saw them), were nothing more and nothing less than weaponised Reeeee brigades.

Anthony Gockowski glimpses the unhappy mind of a professional educator: 

A professor at Connecticut’s Trinity College seemingly endorsed the idea that first responders to last week’s congressional shooting should have let the victims “fucking die” because they are white. “It is past time for the racially oppressed to do what people who believe themselves to be ‘white’ will not do, put [an] end to the vectors of their destructive mythology of whiteness and their white supremacy system. #LetThemFuckingDie,” Trinity College Professor Johnny Eric Williams wrote in a June 18 Facebook post.

Pretentious victimhood is quite a drug.

Noah Rothman on the late Otto Warmbier and the unsavoury pieties of “social justice”: 

“Privilege” is how social-justice advocates describe those who they think should be found guilty under a Rawlsian ideal of distributive justice. So what made Warmbier so deserving of his captivity and mistreatment at the hands of a famously brutal Stalinist regime? Huffington Post blogger La Sha was direct… his heritage. Specifically, his “white male privilege.” “That kind of reckless gall is an unfortunate side effect of being socialised first as a white boy, and then as a white man in this country,” she wrote. In fact, it’s not rare for North Korea to take American citizens hostage, but they are often of Korean heritage. There are three Americans of Korean origin in Pyongyang’s clutches right now, in fact. The author of this deluded, bigoted rant makes no effort to understand the conditions in North Korea. Why should she? Her appeals to identity politics are enough for her baseless opinion to be taken seriously and published in a national political blog.

According to Ms Sha, being imprisoned in North Korea and sentenced to 15 years in a hard labour camp, for stealing a poster, then suffering extensive and mysterious brain injuries and being left in a persistent vegetative state, is not unlike being a middle-class black journalist who writes for the Huffington Post. Mr Warmbier, she wrote, was merely experiencing her own “daily reality.”

Somewhat related. 

Meanwhile, in Mexico City:

A Student Strike Becomes an Occupation, for 17 Years.

Savour that mental image.

It remains unclear exactly who occupies the building and how many members compose the occupying force. Insular and mercurial, they refused repeated requests for interviews. “We’re against the mass media,” explained one occupier, who declined to give his name, saying it was a policy of the occupation not to grant interviews without consent of “the general assembly.” He was standing in what was once the lobby of the auditorium, its walls now covered with insurrectionist stickers, graffiti, posters and murals. “I don’t want to be assimilated into the mass media,” he said.

Oh, there’s more:

Since the late 1960s, the building has been commonly known as the Che Guevara Auditorium. “This has been the most politically symbolic space that the university has had in its entire history,” said Imanol Ordorika Sacristán, head of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s office of institutional evaluation.

And,

For many years the occupation operated as a collective of various radical groups, though its composition mutated, sometimes violently… In 2013, for instance, self-proclaimed anarchists drove other groups out of the building, according to local news accounts. Three months later, however, a band of rivals stormed the auditorium and ejected the anarchists. Later the anarchists — armed with metal rods, fire extinguishers and sticks embedded with nails — violently retook control of the building. The university administration issued a denunciation of the violence and ordered “the immediate surrender” of the auditorium, to no avail.

After several such coups and counter-coups, no-one seems entirely clear what, exactly, the protestors are currently protesting against. However, the building has been unilaterally declared an “autonomous, self-managed workspace,” a leaderless “horizontal organisation,” and is a lively venue for T-shirt salesmen, pamphleteers, and marijuana vendors. And to highlight the occupiers’ immense political gravitas,

A sound system outside the auditorium blasts hard-core punk music.

Via Christina Hoff Sommers. 

A telling exchange, one of many:

“It essentially sounded like you were being held hostage. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to go with two escorts – is that true?”

“Erm, that’s what the students felt was true. I was going to go to the bathroom regardless and they wanted to escort me.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did they want to escort you to the bathroom?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask them?”

“No, of course not.”

From Michael Moynihan’s short film on events at Evergreen State College, where ‘progressive’ utopia is under construction.

Update:

In the thread below, several commenters note that the dramas at Evergreen – this Theatre of the Bedlamites™ – is merely an extension and enactment of the values being inculcated by the staff. After years of wearing away the customary moral and behavioural restraints, and after years of rewarding pathological vanities and delusions of persecution, the leftist bureaucrats and educators were caught off-guard by the speed and vehemence with which their own protégés turned on them, using mob force and well-practised spite, and merrily wielding baseball bats. Which reveals just how blinded by ideology, and how ludicrous, and unfit, those educators are.

This, as they say: 

Captures the air of things, I think.