Students in UC Santa Cruz professor Ryan Coonerty’s constitutional law course have a pretty interesting essay prompt this semester. The professor lays out a hypothetical situation in which a group called Students for Offensive Speech invites a “controversial reality TV star” named “Donald Rump” to the school, according to Campus Reform. Students have to pretend they are general counsel for the school and cite case law to back up their analysis of the situation.
Rump’s show “will feature music with offensive lyrics, strippers, and anti-immigrant speakers,” according to Coonerty’s prompt.
OK, first of all, putting aside the fact that what is and is not offensive is entirely subjective: no group is going to call itself Students for Offensive Speech. And then “anti-immigrant speakers”? It should come as no shock that Coonerty used to be a Democrat mayor when he conflates legal and illegal immigration.
The essay prompt, which is worth 30% of students’ final grades, continues: “Rump’s show undoubtedly include[s]offensive material and has been known to target women, minorities, and the disabled. It is rumored that he will be handing out the names, photos, and addresses of student leaders and faculty who are outspoken in their support for transgender, Muslim, and undocumented communities.”
And here’s where we slip from bad parody into fabrication. When has Trump doxxed students and professors who support these groups? This really just seems like projection on the professor’s part: most of the high-profile doxxing I see today comes from the left, like Antifa posting Tucker Carlson’s home address or CNN threatening to doxx the dude who made that GIF of Trump slamming them in a wrestling match.
Now I don’t want to bash Coonerty too hard because he apparently had his students read The Coddling of the American Mind, discusses free speech issues in the classroom, and says conservative students really like his course because it’s even-handed. All I’m saying is I haven’t seen too many essay prompts vilifying Obama and Hillary…where’s that kind of diversity?
If you attend the University of Kansas, you have the great privilege of taking this course called “Angry White Male Studies,” according to Campus Reform. It’s three credits and it doesn’t matter if you’re a women’s, gender, and sexuality studies student or a general humanities student because the course is cross-listed in both departments.
The course apparently “charts the rise of the ‘angry white male’ in America and Britain since the 1950s, exploring the deeper sources of this emotional state while evaluating recent manifestations of male anger.”
Yes, yes, let’s pathologize people based on their gender and skin color, but only if they’re white men. I guess Dinesh D’Souza is right, “the Democrats are the real racists!” I reached out to Christopher Forth, the very white male teaching this course, for some examples he’ll use in class, but he was too craven to respond in time for press. Or maybe he just had a really intense self-flagellation session, I don’t know.
I’m willing to bet though that Trump will get more than a passing mention in this course. Speaking of the president, the University of California – Santa Cruz has a course on Trump’s “potential impeachment” called “Trajectories of Justice: Standing Rock, Climate Change, and Trump’s Potential Impeachment,” reported Campus Reform. It’ll discuss Trump’s “neglect of duty” with regard to climate change.
Now, to be fair, the course will look at Alan Dershowitz’s book The Case Against the Democratic House Impeaching Trump, but, get this, the course outright admits that it will use the “context of progressive American history.”
So from outright teaching about “angry white males” to admitting you’re studying a subject through only a progressive lens, the libs sure aren’t pulling any punches when it comes to masking their bias. It’s the mark of a faction that is supremely confident. But confidence can quickly turn to arrogance, which certainly can be manipulated.
