When you go to college, orientation is the first chance you get to meet people who just might become your life-long friends. It’s a time to unite, but some schools appear to be using it as an opportunity to divide. In addition to a general orientation, UC Berkeley hosts separate orientation ceremonies for black students, disabled students, Latino students, Native American students, and Asian American students, according to The College Fix.
You can probably guess the one racial group that definitely does not have a separate orientation. And the other thing that’s pretty wack about this is that it creates, right off the bat, the presumption of inequality, discrimination, or what have you. If these were student groups coming together after semesters of actual experience on campus, that would be one thing, but these orientations are hosted by UC Berkeley and in all likelihood give minority students the impression that they’re victims before they’ve even met their classmates or dorm mates.
Speaking of dorms, students and activists at Berkeley recently pushed for the creation of a sanctuary dorm on campus, even though UC Berkeley is actually already a sanctuary campus.
Helping spearhead that initiative was Antifa group By Any Means Necessary’s very own Yvette Felarca, a middle school teacher known for teaching people on the right not to exercise their free speech in public, as well as her blunders in trying to use the court to silence her political opponents, which has cost her quite a bit of money.
You know you’re on the side of tolerance and empathy when Yvette Felarca has your back.
UC Berkeley has its very own Undocumented Student Program, reported Campus Reform. You don’t need a student login to see it, you don’t need to go on the school WiFi — no, no, it’s a publicly available part of the taxpayer-funded Berkeley’s website.
Now, the University of California system has promised not to cooperate with immigration enforcement, refusing to show them private records unless ordered by a court.
UC Berkeley also offers mental health counseling, academic support, legal support, and even has an “undocumented students” check box on its scholarship application. The school used donor money to give out 81 grants of up to $500 this spring and even offers some free meal plans to illegal alien students.
Not a bad deal, huh? UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ wrote the school community in late June, warning of ICE raids but promising that “When we have advance notice, the Undocumented Student Program staff communicate directly with impacted students about these visits to campus.”
Great, So they have time to leave their dorms, run from the law. Here we are, 2019 in clown world, with government-funded institutions directly defying a government agency. This is one of those times when the whole federal, state, local division of laws in America doesn’t really work out. That obviously needs to be revisited, as well as the “sanctuary” campus and city nonsense. Orange man, where you at?
When you think of the concept of censorship, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? It’s probably either Facebook or UC Berkeley, which are now teaming up to fight fake news, reported Campus Reform. Facebook’s investing $7.5 million in a project with Berkeley, Cornell, and the University of Maryland. Hany Farid, one of the Berkeley professors working with Facebook, says “We will be working towards developing new technology to detect fake news, fake images, and fake videos….This is part of a larger effort by Facebook to reign in harmful and dangerous mis-information campaigns on their platform.”
So you can guess where this is probably going to lead. The Nancy Pelosi video with her words slurred? Gone. But think about it: who’s probably the most edited and spoofed person online? I’d bet it’s President Trump, but something tells me we won’t be seeing those videos banned.
Now, Farid’s interested in making Big Tech corps publishers instead of platforms, which would open them up to getting sued, but it looks like his issues with social media are bullying, hate speech, privacy loss, and fake news. Loss of privacy is definitely important but I think the other three are just a BIT less important than mass swathes of people kicked off the platforms altogether just for being conservative. And that’s why even from the start of this little project, I’m pretty black-pilled.
But let me take you for a moment to Boston University, where Professor Marshall Van Alstyne offers another solution to fake news: just tax the crap out of people who distribute it.
Marshall says “You could sample messages, find out some proportion of false and damning information, and then tax in proportion to the damage that’s being done,” according to Campus Reform. Yup, that sounds like something that could be done totally objectively, especially the “damning information” part.
He continues “what you’re doing is you’re taxing the damage. You’re not taxing the speech.”
Yeah but damage according to who, Marshall? Honestly, is this the level of scholarship these guys are getting paid tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars to conduct?
Raka Ray, a University of California, Berkeley professor who just got promoted to dean of social sciences, made the case for why conservatives presumably oppress women in a 2017 lecture, according to Campus Reform.
According to Raka, anti-abortion politics are apparently anti-woman, despite Pew showing over a third of women think abortion should be always or mostly illegal and Gallup putting pro-life women at nearly 50 percent.
Anyways, Raka also had a very nuanced overview of the 2016 US presidential election, conflating complaints related to her smiling with ones linked to her allegedly lying.
Then she goes onto the Trump grab them by the you-know-what remark which, alongside the “good people on both sides” one, is probably the most commonly misconstrued comment of his: media figures and activists ran it as “oh look, Trump’s OK with sexual assault” when he had prefaced the admittedly crass remark with the words “they let you,” suggesting consent.
Raka also seems to have an issue with conservatives’ preference for helping yourself as opposed to looking for government handouts.
She appears absolutely mystified by the prospect that someone could possibly value self-reliance over relegating responsibility to an entity that could pull out the floor from underneath you at any time. And, of course, this individual who demonstrates such an acutelack of understanding of society…is precisely who UC Berkeley taps to lead its social sciences program. Go figure.
