TJ Walker discusses how conservative policies are now censoring campus speech. Texas A&M requires presidential approval to discuss race and gender. Indiana fired a lecturer for showing a graphic linking MAGA to white supremacy.
Chapters
The rise of right wing wokeness on.
Campus.
According to the New York Times, Texas A and M's governing board has approved a system wide rule saying no course will advocate race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity unless the campus president personally signs off. Administrators insist this is just tightening up syllabi and keeping professors on script. Many faculty members say it hands political appointees quiet veto power over what can and cannot be discussed in the classroom. In Indiana, a social work lecturer at Indiana University was pulled from a graduate diversity course after using a widely circulated white supremacy pyramid graphic that listed Make America Great Again as covert white supremacy. One student went to Senator Jim Banks and the matter is now being investigated under new intellectual diversity law. Civil libertarian or civil liberties groups like FIRE and conservative writers such as David French warn that these red state educational gag orders look less like restoring balance and more like old fashioned government censorship. Campus speech okay, what's the real message here?
Yes, there was a problem a few.
Years back where so called left wing thought leaders said you can't use the word homeless anymore. You have to say unhoused or you can't say a pregnant woman anymore. You have to say a pregnant person that was laughed at, scoffed at and ridiculed.
Rightfully so.
But now we're entering a new phase and it's a phase dominated by right wing political correctness, right wing wokeness where you're not allowed to say something that.
Might make someone feel bad.
According to some of this new legislation and its interpretation in places like Texas and Florida.
If you are to talk about American slavery and point out that by and large the slave owners were white and by and large the slaves were black from Africa, that might hurt a white person feelings and therefore it's bad and you can't say that anymore.
This, you know, the right wing in.
America has become a parody of what they accused the left wing of doing for years and it ought to stop. Let's go a little bit deeper here because we're seeing this increasingly sprouting across the country, this right wing wokeism, the idea that Texas A and M is now going to scrutinize anytime someone wants.
To use the word gender or race.
In a classroom just seems bizarre. And, and to be a student and complain to tattle to your senator. I heard something I don't like. I heard something I don't agree with. Well, guess what? College is supposed to be a place where you hear ideas you don't agree with. If you're only hearing stuff you already know and already Agree with. That's just an exercise, a four year exercise in confirmation bias, you're not really learning anything. Is every idea articulated by every professor in college all always going to stand the test of time and be 100% accurate historically and from a factual basis? No, that is the nature of the academic world.
There's competing schools of thought, there are.
Debates, there's vigorous debates, there's evidence. Some ideas come in fashion, some come out of fashion. Let me give you an example. It's all well and good to say, as I hear every take Socialism is the worst form of government and, and nothing can be learned. And every country that's ever tried to have socialism has failed miserably. I hear that every day. And truth be told, I don't consider myself a socialist. If you define socialism as the means of production, the economy being controlled by the government, but still you want to be open to ideas. How, how could our leaders have ever actually combated Marxism if they hadn't learned about Marxism? How could there have ever been a fall of the Soviet Union if we didn't have a lot of American leadership learning about what Soviets actually thought? Now let's go a little bit deeper. Here's a perfect example. Do you believe in public schools? Have you ever sent your child to a public school? Have you ever attended a public school or supported a public school? I'm betting the answer is yes. Well, I got news for you. You're a socialist. Public schools is a socializing of education. Everybody. Government uses its big power, its brutish power to tax people, to raise money, to build a building, to pay teachers. And then it uses its power to coerce a six year old to go to school who otherwise could be in a factory or a field somewhere working for their parents. You know who came up with this idea? Karl Marx, in the Communist Manifesto. So if you say we need to simply put a tamper on any idea we don't like, an idea that we think, broadly speaking, is bad, you get no public school. Sorry. Have you ever enjoyed a public park in your community? Guess what? It was talked about in the Communist manifest. Now, am I a Marxist? No. Do I want to see some leader in a government authoritarian, communist, any type of leader controlling every aspect of the economy as communist societies did? No, I don't. But the beauty of capitalism in my view, and the beauty of the United States has been we're constantly on the lookout for the best ideas that have practical implications, that actually work. And we steal those ideas, we borrow them, we use them, we adapt them. To our own society. And that's why you got public schools everywhere in America, whereas you really didn't 200 years ago. That's why we have public parks everywhere in America. We really didn't a couple hundred years ago now. There was a lot of open land, but they weren't parks as we think of them. So that's why this is so concerning. You never know when someone who has an overall theory that might be destructive. And I think Karl Marx's theories did a lot of damage to the world. Look no further than the arguably tens of millions, some estimates as high as 100 million people who died under communist rule in China. You don't even have to be worried about the Soviet Union, which was obviously a mess. So I have no doubt that, that some of his ideas were harmful. Some of them were helpful and smart people try to find the best ideas they can anywhere in society. They don't simply say, this guy's on my team, so everything is good. This person not on our team. So we're not going to look there. We're not going to look there. And that's the problem I have with newfound right wing political correctness that is running rampant in college campuses in America today.
