Category Archives: culture

To Hell with Bipartisanship

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Arizona Progressive-Democrat Senator Mark Kelly has made Party’s disdain for us average Americans clear (as if it isn’t already, for some time). He said in an NBC News interview,

that he favors overriding the Senate filibuster to pass national abortion protections.

And

two years ago he [Kelly] argued for passing progressive “voting rights legislation” with 51 votes.

This position jammed my irony meter needle hard against the stop. Progressive voting rights are “rights” of non-citizens to vote in our elections. It’s hard to get more undemocratic than that. Indeed, that’s tautologically completely un-American.

Of course, Party won’t stop there. They’ll always have a Very Good Reason® for carving out Just One More® exception to the filibuster rule.

Just shut up and do things our way. That’s not just Kelly’s purpose—it’s the Progressive-Democratic Party that’s pushing to eliminate the Senate’s filibuster. Outliers like Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema will soon be gone.

The WSJ thinks the Senate filibuster is on the ballot this fall. The news outlet is correct, but only in a limited way. The filibuster matter has put our free-market economy on the ballot, along with the concept of limited government with limited regulation of our lives.

Our two-party system of governance is on the ballot.

Deadlines

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Columbia’s management team gave terrorist supporters a deadline to clear their campus “encampment,” and when the campers ignored the deadline, managers issued them a new deadline. When the terrorist supporters seized and occupied a school building, managers gave them a deadline by which to clear out. And then another.

Terrorist supporters seized a Rhode Island School of Design building, and that school’s managers have issued a deadline. As seems typical of school management teams, the design school’s administrators have yet to announce consequences for demonstrators if they do not comply with the 8 am deadline.

And at MIT:

Anti-Israel agitators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took back their campus encampment after it was initially cleared by police.
…
Protesters at MIT were given a Monday afternoon deadline to voluntarily leave or face suspension. Many cleared out of the area, according to the school spokesperson. Dozens of protesters remained at the encampment through the night.
No arrests had been made as of Monday night, according to the MIT spokesperson.

This sort of thing is all too common, and it’s not unique to today’s school disruptions. As far back as Vietnam War college and university protests, disrupters would occupy school buildings, and school managers would issue deadlines to clear out after deadlines to clear out.

In all those cases, it became necessary, ultimately, for campus and local police, augmented in some cases by State police, to go in and forcibly root out the occupiers.

Enough. It’s time—long past time—for school managers to learn what should by now be the obvious lesson. Deadlines are useless except to the occupiers; all the deadlines do is demonstrate the timidity of school managers.

The correct answer to all of these test questions is to send the campus and local police right in immediately after the campers have encamped and the occupiers have occupied, and root them out. And apply suitable corrective action: expelling the students participating, firing professors (tenured or not) participating, and charging those who’ve committed crimes—vandalism, for instance, is rampant among occupiers—with the relevant charges, and then taking them to trial—no settlements, no plea bargains.

Doublespeak

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MIT’s President Sally Kornbluth, the school’s Provost, Chancellor, and all six academic deans say they’re doing away with the DEI commitment the school had been requiring of prospective employees as a hiring criterion. Through a university “spokesperson,” they told the New York Post,

Requests for a statement on diversity will no longer be part of applications for any faculty positions at MIT[.]

Kornbluth expanded on that.

…compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression…they don’t work.

And more of her expansion:

We can build an inclusive environment in many ways….

There’s the doublespeak with which we’re so used to coming from the mouths of the Left. Kornbluth and her MIT management team will continue their DEI hiring criteria; they just won’t be up front about them regarding loyalty pledges.

Teachers Union Audacity

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The Chicago Teachers Union wants a new contract. Among other things, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates wants salary increases of 9% per year over the next five years, through 2028. That would bring these teachers’ salaries to $144,620 per year.

Ordinary residents’ current income is $65,250 at the 50th percentile and $143,550 at the 90th percentile.

These top 10%-er wannabes aren’t producing commensurate with their current incomes, though.

…only 21% of the city’s eighth graders being proficient readers, according to the last Nation’s Report Card….

Gates again [elision in the original]:

It will cost $50 billion and three cents…. Yes it will, and so what, that’s audacity.

No, that’s teachers union greed. But since it’s negotiating with itself—formally they’ll be negotiating with Chicago’s government—it’ll get all of what it’s demanding.

A Coward’s Copout

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In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the Los Angeles police response to the disruptions and outright riot on the UCLA campus, there was this bit of attempted deflection:

Some universities and officials have blamed outsiders for coming to schools to escalate the protests.

This is a coward’s copout. It’s true enough that some outsiders are involved and fomenting some of the agitation. However, the students are voluntarily choosing to be agitated and choosing, on their own initiative, to participate in the pro-terrorist support, the antisemitic bigotry, the vandalism, the explicit threats of violence that are at the core of the disruptions.

The presence of outsiders in no way absolves these students of their participation in these…disruptions…and in no way mitigates their responsibility for their choices and actions.