Tuesday, September 16, 2025

Some Good, Some Bad, and Some Ironic

 A horizontal bar chart displaying U.S. adult opinions on political violence justification. Bars represent percentages for "Yes," "Not sure," "Prefer not to say," and "No, violence is never justified" across political ideologies: U.S. adults, very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, and very conservative. Colors include red for "Yes," gray for "Not sure" and "Prefer not to say," and purple for "No, violence is never justified." Text at the top reads "Most Americans across the political spectrum say political violence is never justified, but younger and more liberal Americans are more likely to disagree." 

 

One more example of a higher tolerance for violence on the left.   "Very liberal people are 8x more likely to say political violence is justified than very conservative people (25% vs. 3%).".

 

 https://x.com/tonyxtwo/status/1967419550401458186?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

At one point Dan bitched that it wasn't fair to blame the DFL for the killing of Kirk. I disagree and will post examples when I get to the vile stuff, but it doesn't matter. The reality is that some people are being driven away from the DFL because the DFL and ASPL cannot step up and harshly condemn the vile, nasty, threats being spewed from their fellow leftists. It's not about blame for the shooting, it's about disgust from DFL voters with a conscience.  

 

 https://x.com/wisconsin_now/status/1967471185886847271?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 

   A screenshot of a text post from a social media platform. The text is formatted in a chat bubble, attributed to Trevor Michael Tomenh, a professor at University of Wisconsin-River Falls. The text discusses academic freedom, a campus incident involving Charlie, and concerns about university response. A screenshot of a text post from a social media platform. The text is formatted in a chat bubble, attributed to Trevor Michael Tomenh, a professor at University of Wisconsin-River Falls. The text discusses academic freedom, a campus incident involving Charlie, and concerns about university response. 

It's refreshing to see a college professor (likely a DFL voter), take this bold stand.   

 

 https://x.com/mkhammer/status/1967390081565806820?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

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 "He was for “suppressing the views of people he didn’t like” by … funding events where he would hand them microphones?"

 https://x.com/conceptualjames/status/1966887195630846330?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 "I've told the story many times now about why I decided to dedicate my life to fighting Woke and radicalism. It's because of what I saw while doing the Grievance Studies Affair and realizing what it meant. The short version of the story is that we had submitted a paper to a very "reputable" journal called Hypatia about educational theory, urging in that paper that we should arrange various means of abusing more "privileged" students out of their privilege. Wanting it to be humorous and to soften how horrible that is, we urged further that it must be done "with compassion." The peer reviewers liked the idea of the paper but not everything. In particular, they took issue with the idea that we would use compassion instead of a Woke (critical) education modality called "the pedagogy of discomfort," and they told us to read Megan Boler's book Feeling Power about this and to make adjustments. Compassion, they worried, might put the needs of the privileged students ahead of those of the more oppressed, thus multiplying the very harms the program was allegedly meant to correct. I was aghast. Truly aghast. After a couple weeks of thinking about it and discussing it with

in particular, we concluded that what was happening in academic Leftism, including in education, was "the seed of a genocide." Note: I said the seed of a genocide, not a genocide. Seeds don't bear fruit unless they find fertile soil, sprout, grow, and have all the right conditions. People got really mad about this phrasing, though, not understanding it (of course...). The idea was that what academic Leftism was churning out, including for educational models and policy, holds out that certain groups in society are responsible for all society's ills, if for no other reason than "complicity" by group identity, and they have to be punished to reeducate them into a new ideological frame. They have "privilege" and need to learn to recognize it, reject it, and combat it everywhere. Megan Boler's "pedagogy of discomfort" advises putting people with privilege into states of discomfort about their privilege and then just leaving them to sit in it until they begin to understand it and "reform" themselves against it. What we didn't know at the time, but that I do know now, is that what academic Leftism was producing is nothing other than a new, American-context version of Maoism. The "pedagogy of discomfort" is about the process of "struggle" through "criticism and self-criticism." And I could go on (literally, working on a book about this, so at a lot of length). So we were right. What we saw in academic Leftism is, at the very least, the seed of a genocide, maybe even its first sprouts. That observation wasn't made in isolation, of course. By that point, , , and I had been fighting "Social Justice ideology" for years. Peter was being subjected to it routinely in institutional policy at Portland State University where he worked. We were seeing it everywhere in the world (at least online) and working its way into real policy decisions, in universities, K-12 schools, government, companies, and beyond. That's why we were trying to do something. The things Peter was facing at Portland State were solid evidence of the effects this ideology would have when institutionalized. We had seen similar outbursts at universities across America, not least the very famous 2015 outburst against Nicholas Christakis at Yale. BLM had gone fairly wild through 2015 as well in the wake of Michael Brown's death for charging a cop, which they spun into a ridiculous victim-martyr narrative quite successfully. We knew academic Leftism was a major problem. In short, we did the Grievance Studies Affair because we already believed this ideology, which was being developed, certified, and taught in academic Leftism, which we now call "Woke Leftism," threatened to unravel society. So in early 2018, a few weeks after the peer-review comments came back about that paper with those ominous suggestions, I asked my wife if I could quit my job (yes, famously now as a massage therapist) and dedicate everything to studying and exposing this evil ideology as fast as I could, hoping it wasn't already too late. All peers I had to my left politically rejected me completely for this stand. They told me ominously that there was no stopping what's coming and whatever other nonsense I'm hearing again today from new peers. They threatened us, mocked us, slandered us, you name it. So what? So I picked up the cause of exposing the ideology that's now unraveling society and threw myself into it fully and have never looked back. That's not my point, though. My point is that this ideology, which is at the heart of our entire educational system from the very bottom up to the research-frontier top, in almost every academically informed professional association, etc. etc. etc., will unravel society. We were right. In fact, it is unraveling society, and we are now near a point of no return. We must fight this evil ideology and remove it from our educational institutions. We must finish the work the Grievance Studies Affair sought to begin: to delegitimize everything from academic and activist Leftist ideology passing itself off as serious, professional work or anything like best-practices, and to get it out of the institutional tier of our society. Ultimately, the point of this work is ideological subversion, as Yuri Bezmenov explained it. We're now approaching the end of Stage 2 of Ideological Subversion (destabilization), having already been demoralized (Stage 1) largely through the incorporation of what came out of academic Leftism throughout the institutional apparatuses of our society. Stage 3 comes next, if we go there. Stage 3 is "crisis." It is fast, brutal, and terrible, and through it we lose our society. Everything now depends on us recognizing that which takes us closer to Stage 3 of Ideological Subversion and rejecting it. We must walk all of this back, but that starts by stopping, by refusing to take another step forward. "And so the dialectic progresses," the academic Leftists have written. We must understand what that means with all of its polarization, conflict, and tribalism, and reject it. The dialectic must not progress. It must be refused entirely

 

  https://x.com/thefireorg/status/1966590014399144239?s=51&t=cLq01Oy84YkmYPZ-URIMYw

 

 Student acceptance of violence to silence speakers is at a record high.

In 2020, 1 in 5 students said violence was acceptable to stop a speaker. In 2025, that number is 1 in 3. That’s a 79% increase in just five years. And it’s chilling."
 
 
  A line graph depicting the percentage of students who find violence acceptable to stop a speaker from 2020 to 2025. The y-axis ranges from 0% to 100%, labeled as "Percent who say it\'s ever acceptable." The x-axis shows survey years: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. A line tracks an upward trend, starting near 20% in 2020 and reaching approximately 33% in 2025. Text on the graph reads "Overall student opinions on using violence to stop a speaker over time" and "Source: FIRE\'s College Free Speech Survey."
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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