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.

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.

Theodore Dalrymple on the British general election: 

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the election was the recrudescence of the politics of envy and resentment… The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn radiated dislike of the prosperous, even the modestly prosperous. Corbyn and his party’s solutions to the country’s problems were supposedly to be paid for by higher taxes on the richest 5 percent of the population. This proposal overlooked the fact that the top 1 percent of earners already pay almost three times as much in income tax as the bottom 50 percent combined, and also the fact that wealth is dynamic rather than static, resembling more closely the bloom of a grape than a cake to be sliced. Taxes on capital (in other words, state expropriation) were Corbyn’s obvious next step, with capital flight the equally obvious consequence. None of this worried the young, who had as yet no stake in property, only what are sometimes called ideals. The Labour Party offered them and others the beguiling vision of living perpetually at the expense of others.

Related, a few of the beguiled. 

Ben Shapiro on a “toxic masculinity” that feminists rarely mention: 

The left routinely speaks about a world run by women and why such a world would create better men. But the most male-free environment in America exists in black communities, where well over half of black children grow up without fathers. This hasn’t made black boys less violent; it’s made them far more prone to criminality than their non-black peers.

Greg Piper on when “affirmative action” means acting out a racial caricature:

Not only did [Princeton] admissions officers refer to Asian-American applicants as all looking the same on paper and having no distinguishing activities, but they seemingly penalised students of other ethnic backgrounds for not acting ethnic enough… “Were there a touch more cultural flavour, I’d be more enthusiastic,” one officer wrote.  

Emily Zanotti pokes through Evergreen State College’s course catalogue:

This coming fall, for example, you can take a number of classes that count as biology, but actually aren’t biology at all. They include Reproduction: Gender, Race and Power, but also Dancing Molecules, Dancing Bodies, where you’ll use the art of dance to communicate with your body and understand the chemical processes within.

And via dicentra, when selfishness and dishonesty are hailed as virtues:

No, I don’t have to tell you I’m trans before dating you.

Interesting theory. What could possibly go wrong? As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.