It was Antifa vs. white nationalists all over again last Friday at Colorado State University, reported The Collegian. But what controversial event marked the occasion? Was Richard Spencer romanticizing the white ethnostate? Was Milo Yiannopoulos proclaiming he doesn’t believe in lesbians? No. The incendiary speaker at Colorado State was none other than Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, the group whose radical mission is to “promote the principles of freedom, free markets, and limited government.”
Here are some of the slogans of Turning Point USA, the group Antifa was apparently protesting. “Socialism sucks,” “taxation is theft,” these are pretty boilerplate ideas for the conservative/libertarian movement.
And this isn’t a one-time stunt by Antifa. No, it looks like they’ll wreak havoc at another Kirk event in April at the University of Central Florida if their demands aren’t met. Orlando Antifa says “UCF are you aware that Charlie Kirk’s last event was disrupted by violent neo-Nazis? You’re giving him a platform on campus April 10th. Why’re you endangering student safety? Rescind Charlie Kirk’s speech. Uphold your obligation to protect your students!” And then they stupidly show an article with a picture of a white nationalist injured by Antifa even though it looked like there was violence on both sides.
On their protest page for Kirk’s UCF event, the revolutionary socialist group Orlando Workers League makes this clever bit of guilt by association, saying “TPUSA, who campaigns under the same ‘free speech’ pseudo-arguments pioneered by the alt-right, keeps a dossier of professors whose ideas they find ‘dangerous.’…The reality is that every fascist movement must have a public face, a way to gain a foothold in the popular conscience.”
What kinds of ideas do these guys think they’re protesting? Do they honestly think the guy who’s against big government is also a fascist? And why are the white nationalists showing up? It could be that each side consists of attention-seekers starving for more media attention to match the 2017 Berkeley coverage. But more likely, it represents an escalation of the radicalism on both the far-right and far-left with the pretty standard, unobjectionable capitalist Kirk taking on the role of savior of the white race for the one side and evil Nazi for the other.
A task force at Colorado State University has published what I think is the most comprehensive language policing guide ever, a guide reported by Campus Reform. There are more than a hundred terms and I could probably do a whole video on each of them, but I’ll hone in on a couple of really crazy ones. Actually, I’m not allowed to use the word “crazy,” “nuts,” or “maniac” because they’re apparently too tied up with mental illness and the task force that got paid to create this isn’t a big fan of context.
While we’re in the A’s, Colorado State also dislikes the terms “addicted” and “like crack,” saying they can harm people suffering from drug abuse. I scrolled to the C’s to learn that “cake walk” apparently has a history linked to slavery and the school recommends replacing “eenie meenie miney moe” with “randomly selected” because, the school says, the original song included a racial slur.
You know, I actually looked that one up and it turns out that yes, some versions do use the n-word, but 1) it’s unknown whether that’s the original and 2) I seriously doubt anyone who uses that expression or “cake walk” nowadays even know of those connotations. If the left is about reclaiming concepts like they try with socialism, doesn’t this kind of undermine that?
Colorado State claiming “hip hip hooray” was used during the Holocaust when rounding up Jews is another instance of this. The Bustle link they use doesn’t mention it and I only found HuffPost and a couple other sites discussing it, but simply no one uses it nowadays with that implication. And rounding out the craziness, you have a suggestion not to use “hold down the fort” because it was apparently used when defending against American Indians and then the term “normal person,” for which there’s apparently “no replacement as it is never appropriate to use this phrase to describe a person.”
Yeah well I definitely won’t use “normal person” to describe whomever wrote this, don’t worry.
Colorado State University education professor OiYan Poon has been doing a bit of reading recently and, shocker, it’s a Michelle Obama book. She says she doesn’t think Michelle “even believes the whole ‘when they go low, we go high’ b.s.” and that “I’m done ‘going high.’ #ImReady to ‘punch them in the neck.’”
Putting violent tendencies aside for a second, if there’s one somewhat neutral thing you can say about social justice activists, it’s that they’re certainly self-interested. But OiYan may have one position that surprises you. She’s an Asian American, but she’s also a huge fan of affirmative action.
And which group is hurt most by affirmative action in college admissions? That’s right: Asian Americans. A Princeton study estimated that while African Americans and Hispanics receive the equivalent of a 230 and 185-point SAT boost, respectively, in college admissions, Asian Americans get docked 50 points.
I’m guessing that white students, who generally score better than black and Hispanic students but worse than Asians, are somewhere in between with the point compensation. And maybe that’s why OiYan supports it: sure, affirmative action might hurt Asians, but it also hurts whites.
Now sure, one of OiYan’s research interestsis racial politics, but some of these tweets are pretty wack. Here’s the professor soliciting advice on how to defend to an editor her choice to capitalize “black” while lower-casing “white,” here she is complaining about racial diversity in GIFs, worried that she’s gonna get heat for using black ones, and here’s one in which she defends a lady who got banned from Tinder after stipulating in her profile that she doesn’t date white men.
Colorado State University recently published a guide called “10 Ways to Make Social Media Channels More Inclusive,” reported Campus Reform. #2 says “use the yellow emojis when addressing a diverse audience.” This is actually very curious. Most people probably use the yellow one because it’s the default but if you WERE thinking about it from a racial perspective, wouldn’t yellow be Asian? You would think Colorado State would want you to use yellow, black, white, whatever else they have in equal proportions. And what about red? I don’t think there’s any Native American emoji. This is a problem that absolutely needs to be solved.
The school next says “avoid gendered emojis when possible. Instead use one of the variations of the yellow smiley faces or object emojis.” So you’re going to suggest a certain color I use, advise me not to use certain genders — you can already see how this is not very “inclusive.” Now I know at this point you might be thinking “so Shimshock, the guy who wrote this — he must be a real fruitcake.” But, not so fast. THEY must be a real fruitcake if you follow suggestion #1, which says “use inclusive pronouns (they/them/theirs, students, Rams, everyone).”
Then there’s this one, which for some reason really irritated me on a gut level: “use people-first language (person with a disability vs. disabled) unless the person indicates another preference.” Um. No. I’m not going to contort my vocabulary, use an extra six syllables, and use a noun instead of an adjective just to fit your perverted worldview. Sorry, not gonna happen.
Perhaps the only one of Colorado State’s guidelines you should follow is #8: “authentically represent diversity.” You can do this by saying diversity as it’s currently valued is a sham. Hocus pocus. Hogwash…because it focuses on all of the different flavors of shallow, surface-level variety, but not a multitude of personalities, thoughts, you know, the stuff that really matters.
