Are you a pro-life student? You might want to prepare to get punched, have your signs destroyed, and your chalk erased.
The first weekend of December marked the latest instance of left-wing intolerance to pro-life student demonstrators. Fifteen-year-old pro-life student Purity Thomas was praying and advising women in front of a Planned Parenthood when she was punched in the face, reported The Daily Caller.
If that’s not shocking enough, the police didn’t arrest this criminal. Now, Thomas knows who punched her but “she was not disclosing the identity of her assailant because the woman had just had an abortion and she wants her to heal instead of receive harassment.”
“I feel super sorry for her and I want her to know that we’re not violent, we actually care about her,” said Thomas. “Being punched was nothing compared to what those babies are feeling when they are aborted…and honestly, I would take a million punches if it saved one child.”
Texas State University student Ian Ramos kicked and punched in pro-life signs on campus. He stated the signs did not constitute free speech, which is a tad surprising for a history and government student. Ramos is pursuing a teaching certification, as of April 2017.
California State University, Fresno professor Gregory Thatcher erased pro-life chalking on campus, even after a student told him she had gotten permission to chalk in the vicinity. Thatcher will participate in First Amendment training and has to pay $17,000 for a court settlement, but Thatcher’s insurance company will be paying the fee and the professor “did not, in any way, admit to any wrongdoing.” Ramos, who destroyed the signs, received no punishment, and is unrepentant, saying he would do it again. Welcome to 21st century universities, where exercising free speech has its consequences, but prevent it, and you’ll be A-OK.
If you’re a young millennial or old zoomer — that’s Generation Z — SpongeBob SquarePants probably brings to mind days of childhood bliss, a time unmuddied by politics. But that’s not the case for University of Washington professor Holly Barker, who recently published a nearly 10,000-word study called “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” reported Campus Reform.
Now, if you remember, SpongeBob takes place in Bikini Bottom, and Holly’s upset that this is apparently a reference to Bikini Atoll, a Marshall Islands coral reef used by America during the Cold War for nuclear testing. Indigenous people were moved during the testing and radiation ultimately rendered it uninhabitable.
Holly complains about SpongeBob’s supposed “privilege” of “not caring about the detonation of nuclear bombs,” saying “the detonations do not cause concern for the characters, as they did for the Bikinians, nor do they compromise SpongeBob’s frequent activities, like visiting hamburger joints or the beach with friends.”
Yeah, uh, that would be because it’s a kids show.
But here’s the thing: Holly isn’t just mad that the show doesn’t hit children on the head with the full historical context of a place from which it takes half its name and I’m not sure what else. She calls the characters living in this setting an “occupation,” terms it “symbolic violence,” and says “SpongeBob’s presence on Bikini Bottom continues the violent and racist expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands (and in this case their cosmos) that enables U.S. hegemonic powers to extend their military and colonial interests in the postwar era.”
A protester tried to shut down a Northeastern Illinois University event featuring former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, according to Campus Reform.
“You’re a Nazi!” “No, you’re a Nazi!” That’s pretty much how the discourse has devolved. And then when force is used to address a disruption, as it should be, they complain about it being a bit uncomfortable. But what’s really funny is that Sean Spicer wasn’t the only somewhat controversial speaker at Northeastern Illinois.
That’s right — Donna Brazile was also there. You remember Donna, the Democratic National Committee chairwoman who shared debate questions with Hillary Clinton? And yet Donna wasn’t the one getting protested and cussed out.
Also in recent campus news, the head of Freedom University, a school which apparently operates out of an undisclosed location in Georgia, gave a speech at St. Olaf College in Minnseota. Director Laura Soltis said nation states “should not exist” and called citizenship “completely arbitrary.”
Remember Jeff Klinzman? You know, the Iowa professor who responded to a tweet from Donald Trump calling Antifa out for attacking people with baseball bats by saying “yeah, I know who I’d clock with a bat” and who outright told ABC9 “I am Antifa”? He parted ways with the school in late August, but is now planning on suing Kirkland Community College and is still taking a paycheck, reported Campus Reform.
Klinzman had some other pretty disturbing stuff on social media, liking several Antifa-related Facebook pages and quoting a poem reading “kill them all, and bury them deep in the ground, before millions more are tortured to death” when talking about Evangelical Christians who, according to him, “fill [him] with rage, and a desire to exact revenge.”
Now, it’s weird because Kirkland Community College said it made a “decision to remove Mr. Klinzman from the classroom,” citing safety concerns, but then said “We have spoken with Mr. Klinzman this afternoon about this matter and have accepted his resignation.”
And this little incongruity here — how did someone who was removed from the classroom also resign? – is part of the professor’s planned lawsuit against the school. Klinzman said that he believes his First Amendment rights were violated and that the college communicated to him that he could resign or it would fire him. An email from the college showed that Klinzman did, in fact, resign, but he did so on the condition that he still earns his full salary of $3,624 for the 16-week semester.
