FIRE report on the fallout of a class on global trade: 

As it has in earlier years, [adjunct professor Richard] Taylor’s instruction focused on early global trade, including trade in silver and potatoes. As part of the class, he also covered the more pernicious aspects of early trade, such as slavery, the abuse of indigenous populations, and the spreading of disease. On his final slide was a discussion prompt: “Do the positives outweigh the negatives?” A lively discussion ensued. One student said slavery could never be justified. According to Taylor, he clarified that no one is justifying slavery and asked students to consider global trade as a whole, including lives lost to disease and lives saved from famine.

None of which proved sufficient to prevent Professor Taylor being removed from his classroom and found guilty of “bias” – without appeal, without reference to any specific violations of policy, and without seeing any evidence of misconduct. Activist students, who seemingly prioritised activism over learning, accused the professor of committing a “heinous crime,” and of posing a “threat to the safety of our BIPOC [black, indigenous and people of colour] community.” For which, they insist, he should be “terminated fully.”

At which point, readers may wish to consider the possibility that “social justice” activism – in this case, waging a spiteful, nakedly dishonest smear campaign in order to destroy a man’s livelihood and thereby feel powerful – is much more exciting than studying, especially if you’re not particularly equipped for academic activity – a demographic from which such activists are very often drawn – and much more likely to gratify any malevolent inclinations.

That left-leaning educators and campus administrators generally pretend that these aren’t the kind of variables to consider when weighing accusations of “bias” – and a somewhat improbable “threat to the safety of our BIPOC community” – says quite a lot about the kind of people they are too, and the kind of environment they inhabit.*

Thom Nickels notes a scandalous development: 

Philadelphia Weekly, one of the city’s most venerable leftist “alternative” newsweeklies, has rocked the local journalism scene with its announcement that, starting next year, it will provide Philly readers with a different kind of alternative: it will change its editorial outlook from hard-liberal to conservative.

And Craig Frisby on what isn’t racism:

Time for another visit to the pages of Scary Mommy, a publication for progressive mothers, and where Ms Christine Organ has a problem:

For years, I’ve known that I have trouble sitting still, that I find projects and things to fret over. I need to literally schedule time to binge watch TV, and I multitask like a freaking boss. What I don’t know is how to let my mind and body rest.

You see, leisurely uses of time, including “lounging about on a rainy Saturday afternoon,” are fraught with mental hazards:

When I do something enjoyable – with no other “productive” purpose – I feel guilty… I’ve always thought that this is just how I’m wired (and maybe it is), but there’s something else at play too,

Happily, Ms Organ has fathomed the cause of her agitation and sorrow:

I suffer from internalised capitalism – and you probably do too.

Ms Organ, an “author and storyteller,” and user of Xanax, hints, almost coyly, at her own political leanings:

I’m on the democratic socialist end of the spectrum.

Then teases us some more:

Like lots of women I know, I have anxiety. And, like lots of women I know, my anxiety manifests itself in ways that are unique to me. Namely, my strongest attacks occur in my sleep. 

In the pages of Scary Mommy, a publication all about “empowerment,” Michaela Brown shares a tale of adversity and heroism: 

The other night was particularly rough. I shot up in bed, heart pounding, feeling terrified and not knowing where I was… It took me several minutes to calm my mind and slow my heart rate before I could comfortably lie back down again.

It’s all rather dramatic. One wonders what the cause of such nocturnal torments might be. The coronavirus pandemic is mentioned in passing, along with an allergy-prone son. But these things, it turns out, are manageable and routine, and merely a prelude to the real sleep-shattering trauma.

What’s causing the latest round of panic in my sound-asleep mind?

You may want to clutch the arms of your chair.

My paperwork for my absentee ballot had arrived in the mail that day.

Which is to say,

It’s the election. That’s my primary source of anxiety right now, and I don’t know how to turn it off. Because I’m fucking terrified of Trump winning again. 

Not merely terrified, you understand, but fucking terrified. A fear capable of inducing rhetorical incontinence and a chronic loss of sleep.

And not like the anxiety I felt in 2016—that was nothing compared to these fears. That anxiety barely scratched the surface of what 2020 feels like. 

Once again, it occurs to me that politics really shouldn’t occupy that much space in a person’s life. It isn’t the kind of stuff a life should be filled with, such that it dominates one’s outlook and everyday activity, even one’s dreams. The result is very often a kind of bad mental opera. 

Charlotte Allen on the farcical racial pantomime of Jessica Krug: 

On September 9th, Krug abruptly resigned from her job as associate professor of African history at George Washington University. Apparently fearing imminent exposure, she confessed that she had passed herself off for more than a decade as being of black-African descent from an ever-shifting range of backgrounds. In graduate school, she told fellow students she was of Algerian origin with a German father. Later, she claimed that she was from the inner-city “hood” with a spiritual kinship to the late rapper Biggie Smalls… Her final self-proclaimed provenance seems to have been the South Bronx slums, where she identified as a “boricua,” or Stateside-dwelling Puerto Rican, whose mother had been a drug addict. She also moonlighted as a salsa-dancing community activist with the tag “Jess La Bombalera” and was videoed at a New York City Council hearing in June 2020 berating the police for violence against “my black and brown siblings.”

In fact, Krug is white, Jewish, and from suburban Kansas City. She attended a Jewish day school growing up and then the preppy Barstow School in Kansas City, where 12th-grade tuition is currently more than $22,000.

Needless to say, things then get a little odd. And rather telling, not least regarding the widespread pretensions and woke neuroticism, and the dismal intellectual standards, of academia’s Clown Quarter.

Seth Barron on the cost of noxious woke pretensions: 

The Department of Education has called Princeton’s bluff on the question of systemic racism, and not a moment too soon. The entire country has been forced to listen, for months now, as a parade of elite institutions—universities, banks, media outlets, a national political party, entire professions—issue laments about systemic American racism and their own complicity in the perpetuation of whiteness. This orgy of recrimination is patently insincere. Does anyone believe these people, or imagine that their contrition is real? Of course not. Qui s’accuse, s’excuse, the French say: who accuses oneself, excuses oneself. The whole rigmarole is a self-justifying performance by whites for an audience of likeminded other whites: beatified souls who have achieved a state of grace. They stand in opposition to bad whites, who refuse to apologise for their privilege.

And Heather Mac Donald on avoided truths:

The Other Half thinks that some of you may be amused by this. 

Previously. 

Update, via the comments:

Joan asks, drily, “Is it performance art?”

Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose it is. It’s all rather performative and narcissistic, and the theatrical breathlessness is presumably for the benefit of a like-minded audience – one that won’t find such behaviour strange or unflattering. I mean, if you were actually having some kind of meltdown, an unpremeditated psychological crisis, would your first thought be to film yourself in order to share the screeching with your equally woke peers, and thereby accrue status?

It’s not just the ladies, of course. Quite a few leftist chaps seem a tad unstable too:  

I wrote earlier about trying to express my reasons to my dad in a calm and intellectual manner. I actually thought I had been calm and well-reasoned. I thought I might even be making progress. Today I found out he put a Trump sign in his yard. I got pissed. Really pissed. And I sent him and my mom a text message. Hands shaking, tears in eyes.

From an item titled, rather triumphantly, Today I Gave My Dad A Choice: Trump or His Grandkids and His Son.

Pronouns declared, obviously.

Update 2: 

As with Ms Christina Cauterucci, a “gender and feminism” enthusiast whose Slate article is poked at here, you have to wonder whether fantasies of coercion and sadistic emotional punishment, and blackmailing your own parents in order to purge them of non-leftist views – using the threat of never seeing their grandchildren – is really a sign of a well-adjusted adult. And not, say, someone exhibiting a kind of cult-like behaviour. And remember, these things are announced publicly, with pride. “What a clever and principled leftist I am.”

Further unspoolings can be found here and here. Also, open thread. Share ye links and bicker.