Mark Meckler
Madeleine Kearns came to New York to study at New York University. In the American Spectator, she writes about her time at this famed university where she describes it as “bewildering.” I love her opening lines. “As a child in Glasgow, I learned that sticks and stones might break my bones but words didn’t really hurt. I’m now at New York University studying journalism, where a different mantra seems to apply. Words, it turns out, might cause life-ruining emotional trauma.”
That’s about right. The world of American Universities is so rife with political correctness and rising Democratic Fascism that no one can completely understand it. It doesn’t, after all, make sense to kowtow to the most easily offending person in the room. Yet, that’s what is happening all over this nation. Kearns noticed this during Welcome Week:
“During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’? The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence. Later I realised why: expressing bewilderment at the obsession with pronouns might count as a ‘micro-aggression’. Next stop, ‘transphobia’.”
Apparently that student didn’t realize that jokes are no longer funny under Democratic Fascism.
After a year on campus, on a course entitled ‘Cultural Reporting and Criticism’, I still feel unable to speak freely, let alone critically. Although it doesn’t apply to my own course, friends have told me about ‘trigger warnings’ that caution they are about to be exposed to certain ideas; the threat of micro-aggressions (i.e. unintended insults) makes frank discourse impossible. Then there is the infamous ‘safe space’ — a massage-circle, Play-Doh-making haven — where students are protected from offence (and, therefore, intellectual challenge).
And that, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with American education these days, folks. Play-Doh. Really. At college. None of this should be shocking. The new rise of Democratic Fascism infantilizes its adherents. Fight back. Let’s all try to be adults for once.
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