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Seinfeld vs. Woke Left, Columbia Radicals Running the Campus, U.S. Doesn’t Need a ‘Momala’

April 30, 2024 by GregC

Listen to “Seinfeld vs. Woke Left, Columbia Radicals Running the Campus, U.S. Doesn’t Need a ‘Momala'” on Spreaker.

Join Jim and Greg today we they cheer Jerry Seinfeld for correctly accusing the woke left of killing comedy as we knew it for generations, hammer the administrators at Columbia University for continuing to let the inmates run the asylum, and cringe as Drew Barrymore (and way too many other Americans) see themselves as the children of our politicians.

First, they agree wholeheartedly with comedy legend Jerry Seinfeld’s contention that the woke left’s obsession with never being offended has effectively killed television comedies and many other forms of the art. And Jim adds that comedy is also a problem for the left because it helps people see their shared life experiences…and that’s bad for a movement who is constantly seeking to divide us.

Next, they unload on the president and other administrators at Columbia University. After setting another deadline for the pro-Hamas, anti-Israel demonstrators to clear their encampment, there were no consequences when the protesters ignored it. Later, the campus radicals took over an academic building and administrators are, thus far, doing nothing about it.

Finally, they groan as TV host Drew Barrymore tells Vice President Kamala Harris, “We need you to be Momala for the country.”Jim and Greg explain why they think it is painfully wrong for Americans to think of themselves as the children of our political leaders. However, this is nothing new, and they look back at a cringeworthy moment from a presidential campaign decades ago that provided momentum for this warped notion.

The College President Who Fights Back

May 9, 2017 by GregC

Across the country, loud and sometime violent campus protesters are often met by administrators who ultimately give into the demands related to perceived slights on issues ranging from race to gender and sexuality to alleged to hate speech, but one college president is fighting back and says the pursuit of truth – not unanimous political ideology ought to be the goal of higher education.

Oklahoma Wesleyan University President Dr. Everett Piper burst on to the scene in late 2015, when he wrote an open letter to his students and famously explained their campus was not a day care but a university. He is also the author of the forthcoming book, “Not A Day Care: A Coddled Nation is a Crippled Nation.”

Dr. Piper is also speaking up after the latest round of campus unrest, specifically the saga over Ann Coulter’s scheduled appearance at the University of California-Berkeley, an which ultimately never happened. In his column for The Christian Post, Piper unloads on what he sees as an assault on free speech and an abdication of role played by higher education.

“The liberal arts institution was founded some 1,000 years ago, let’s say at Oxford, for what? To educate a free man and a free woman, to educate culture and what it means to enjoy liberty, and liberation, thus the word liberal,” said Piper, in a follow-up interview to his column.

He says that original purpose is now almost recognizable at most schools.

“The classical liberal is someone who stands for freedom, for liberty, and for liberation. What we see today within the American academy is the shutting down of ideas. We see ideological fascism rather than academic freedom,” said Piper.

“The conservative voice is actually more classically liberal because we’re arguing for an open, robust exchange of ideas. Why? Because we can trust truth to judge the debate rather than politics or power,” said Piper.

Piper says the problem has been brewing for many decades, when ideology became more important than truth.

“We’ve taught lousy ideas for decades in the academy and we’re seeing lousy behavior on the campus green and in the campus quad today. These student rebellions, these snowflake rebellions, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces are being called for because we’ve taught these kids this intellectual mush and this ideological narcissism and nihilism,” said Piper.

“We hear people say things like, ‘I hate these hateful people. I’m sure that nothing’s sure. I’m absolutely confident there are no absolutes, and I can’t tolerate your intolerance.’ It’s self-refuting at every turn. The reason we see this is because we started teaching this type of nihilism and intellectual relativism and intellectual mush some three, four, five decades ago,” said Piper.

“When you teach good ideas, you get good culture, good kids, good community, good government, good church, etc. When you teach bad ideas, you get the opposite,” he said.

So why aren’t more administrators pushing back?

“I’ll be very blunt here: lack of spine, lack of courage, lack of conviction. They’re more interested in capitulation and compromise. We’re more interested in a conversation than we are in demonstrating conviction and purpose and principle. We don’t seem to have the heart and the soul to engage in the things that are right and just and true,” said Piper.

And he says the administrators are often ideologically in sync with the protesters.

“We call for justice but deny that there is a Judge. We argue that we want tolerance but then act intolerable to anybody we can’t tolerate. Our administrators and our presidents and our professors parrot this pablum. They don’t have the conviction and the spine,” said Piper.

Piper also pushes back hard against the notion that free speech somehow began at Berkeley in the 1960’s. He says the people who believe that are about 2,000 years behind.

“Free speech was not born at Berkeley. It was born at Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago, because without the truth you shall never be set free,” said Piper.

Piper says history shows that removing God and His word from a society never results in freedom because man’s rules then intervene to fill the vacuum. He says true freedom is like playing music or sports in that one has great freedom within certain boundaries.

“You are only set free with the context of truth, judging the activity you want to be free to engage in. When we abandon the concept of truth, you don’t get freedom, you get tyranny. And that’s what you see in the snowflake rebellion in the streets of Berkeley,” said Piper.

He says the very notion of safe spaces misses the point of education.

“Safety is not what good education is about. Goodness is what good education should pursue, but you’ve got to have a measuring rod outside of those things being measured or you can do no measuring, according to C.S. Lewis,” said Piper.

“You have to have the measuring rod of Truth with a capital T, and goodness and justice, and mercy. Those things all come from the Judeo-Christian ethic that our country was founded upon. If we don’t have that ethic any longer, we’re going to see fascism and tyranny and power prevail, rather than live by principles that give us freedom,” said Piper.

His immediate advice is for families to refuse to send their children to colleges that don’t embrace truth.

“Moms and dads, stop sending your kids to these institutions that teach this pablum and send them to places that teach what’s actually objectively right and real and true and good,” said Piper.

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‘The Brainwashing Is Very Effective’

April 17, 2017 by GregC

Liberal groupthink is nothing new on college campuses but resorting to violence and intimidation to stifle views contrary to the progressive orthodoxy is a dangerous escalation, according to a prominent scholar who was recently targeted by an angry mob of students and warns free speech is under fierce assault in the United States.

Earlier this month, the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald experienced the hostility first-hand, while visiting the west coast, first at UCLA and then at Claremont-McKenna College. Her visit to Claremont-McKenna was the most harrowing, with protesters blocking access to the auditorium where Mac Donald was to give her presentation. Organizers then tried to have her speak via video access before the event was finally cancelled over security concerns.

“The day before Claremont-McKenna, I had an effort to storm the stage. That was at UCLA. At Claremont-McKenna was a blockade around the building where I was supposed to speak to prevent anyone from entering to be able to listen to me in person and interact with me. That’s certainly the most extreme that I’ve experienced,” said Mac Donald.

Protesters targeted Mac Donald in response to her book “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe,” accusing her of being a racist and a fascist.

This is the latest in a series of campus unrest as a result of a speaker who does not subscribe to standard liberal views. Riots broke out at the University of California at Berkeley when Milo Yiannapoulos was scheduled to speak. A professor at Middlebury College in Vermont suffered a concussion while trying to protect American Enterprise Institute scholar Dr. Charles Murray.

Mac Donald says the intolerance of the left is reaching new heights.

“I had a direct experience of how a student body reacts to a non-conforming opinion. It basically reacts like an immune system does, surrounding the alien virus with corpuscles to try to expel it from the body politic,” said Mac Donald.

“There is no an increasing insistence that everybody hew to the same line and that line is something very, very dangerous for the future of America. It hold that this country is rife with oppression, that minorities in particular are the victim of non-stop bigotry and anybody who dares propose facts to the contrary is simply not to be tolerated,” said Mac Donald.

Colleges are often billed as the place to explore and compare different ideas, yet administrators seem to do little or nothing to punish students who stoke violence or prevent the exercise of free speech.

Mac Donald is not surprised.

“College administrators are reluctant to discipline students for clear violations of their rules for fear of alienating the parents, alienating the student darlings. That’s a purely economic self-interest explanation for the passivity of administrators in the face of this,” said Mac Donald.

But she sees another factor at work as well.

“The campus bureaucracies are being colonized now by people of the left who believe in identity politics and have a stake in students thinking of themselves as victims because that necessitates, allegedly, an ever-growing student service and diversity bureaucracy,” said Mac Donald.

One of the great ironies of this campus groupthink for Mac Donald is the insistence the students are fighting fascism by forbidding alternative viewpoints to be expressed.

“I’m amazed anybody has the sheer gall to label themselves anti-fascist, who then says [they] are shutting down me, or Charles Murray or Ann Coulter and nobody else gets to hear that person without anybody taking a vote. I mean it is the very definition of at least soft totalitarianism,” said Mac Donald.

Mac Donald says liberal academics are succeeding in their mission to groom the next generation to consider only the ideas of the far-left.

“The brainwashing is very effective. Students are told that the police are racist and that mass incarceration is a reality aimed at re-enslaving blacks. If you’re hit with that enough, you do start to believe it,” said Mac Donald.

As intimidation and violence becomes more common on campus, where does this kind of development ultimately lead our society?

“It ends badly,” said Mac Donald. “These students graduate. They take levers of power in government, in corporate HR departments. They are absolutely committed to the view that America is profoundly racist, sexist, mysogynist, you name it. They will put in policies to support that view,” said Mac Donald.

But in addition to the impact on the culture and the workplace, Mac Donald fears for the future of free speech.

“Traditionally, America has had the greatest degree of freedom of speech of any western, industrialized country. There’s much stronger speech codes in Europe. I think we could be moving in that direction and that means less and less possibility for correcting the errors that guide so many members of the cultural and political elite,” said Mac Donald.

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