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A college president speaks out. Is anyone listening? (See 1 and 1a below.)
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The attitudinal difference between America and Israel towards the military is striking. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) Lack of Leadership Has Crippled Our Universities
Our university leaders and faculty need to grow a spine. Our times demand it.
We have too many learned cowards lining once-hallowed halls of learning. Fewer and fewer voices have the courage to stand and speak the truth and simply say “I disagree.”
Those who dare to do so are ignored or silenced by the “tolerant” who deem the rare voice of dissent as intolerable.
A professor at Wake Forest University admitted:
The problem is that whenever you are on the liberal left, to some degree, you don’t really see conservative ideas as even valid or worth the time and effort to allow because you have a sense that you know more and you know better. This arrogance creates an ‘ideological vacuum.’ In this vacuum, professors do not acknowledge counter-arguments on issues or challenge their own assumptions.
Vapid leadership allows this ignorance to be the norm. A vacuum will be filled by something. In today’s culture, it’s being filled by snowflake insanity, and our culture is paying a high price.
College and university presidents, board members, and faculty have let this travesty occur. Our schools are permeated with anti-Christian and nonsensical, dare I say suicidal, ideas.
Even worse, Judeo-Christian words have been stolen. Love, freedom, equality, justice, truth, and compassion are all changing before our very eyes.
Too many academic leaders stand idly by, content to drink the Kool-Aid of false compassion. We have bought the lie that confrontation and compassion are antithetical rather than complimentary. It’s nonsense.
Discipline and love are complementary, not antithetical. Our unwillingness to help students by confronting and disciplining them reveals our lack of love for them.
We don’t coddle because we care about students. We coddle because we don’t care enough to bother. We care more about our own feelings of comfort or desire to be popular than their growth and readiness for the challenges of real life.
We don’t coddle because we care about students. We coddle because we don’t care enough to bother. We care more about our own feelings of comfort or desire to be popular than their growth and readiness for the challenges of real life.
Confrontation is not synonymous with hate. Any decent parents know if we love our kids, we’ll confront them. Failing to confront will result in them compromising body, mind, and soul.
But, today we have parents who don’t know how to rear or confront their children properly. We have professors who don’t know how to confront their students with good ideas and challenge their bad ideas.
We have college presidents who get caught like deer in the headlights when there’s a cultural conflict. They don’t want to call a spade a spade because they’re afraid of being labeled a hater.
Search online for university presidents who will take a stand for truth, and you’ll find a very short list of those willing to stand tall in the face of the snowflake rebellion.
Sadly, even evangelical Christians, who are supposed to be the ones proclaiming the truth, either stand by and do nothing or actively attack those with the courage to stand.
Their criticism simply proved my point. Their solution was to criticize me for being too critical; to confront me for being too confrontational; to write a blog about tolerance while calling my blog intolerable.
They seemed to think the best rebuttal to my public critique was to write their own public critique rebutting public critiques. They seemed only too ready to argue that comfort is more important than repentance and support is more important than challenge.
Their solution was and is to coddle and enable more—to confront and challenge less .
I hardly even need to respond. Any schoolboy can see the self-refuting nature of their argument.
Even a self-described atheist from the psychology department at the University of Central Florida wrote, “I don’t agree with your religion, but thank you for saying what needs to be said … Please carry on!”
While much of the secular world recognizes the lunacy of safe spaces, the church condemns those who love young people enough to speak the truth and confront them. Sad. Shameful.
As you watch the snowflake rebellion play out on campuses across the nation, ask yourself this: Have university presidents indeed become essentially irrelevant? Do you see strength or weakness in their leadership?
Do they show any evidence that they have the convictions to stand in the face of this nonsense, or does your gut tell you that they are simply more concerned with keeping their job?
Or even worse, do they seem to actually believe that giving Play-Doh, bubbles, and coloring books to a bunch of 20-year-olds who don’t like the results of an election is a good idea?
This article was adapted with permission from Everett Piper’s new book, “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth.”
1a)
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2) Newsletter Distributed on College Campus Calls for Banning Veterans
A newsletter distributed at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs says veterans shouldn't be in college:
1a)
Behind the Bedlam in Berkeley
Antifa activists believe in censorship and don’t rule out violence, as they showed again Sunday.
By The Editorial Page
Politically charged street brawls broke out in Berkeley, California, on Sunday, with police arresting 13 charming participants on charges including assault with a deadly weapon. One Twittervideo showed masked activists kicking a man curled in fetal position on the ground; the beat-down stopped only when a journalist, Al Letson, shielded the man with his body. “I was scared they were going to kill him,” Mr. Letson said.
As Charlottesville drew attention to the worst elements of the far right, Sunday’s melee revealed an increasingly violent fringe of the radical left that has received far less media coverage, much less criticism. It’s called Antifa, pronounced “An-tee-fa,” which is short for “anti-fascist.”
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Antifa members sometimes claim their movement spans the globe and dates to the 1920s and ’30s, citing the 1936 Battle of Cable Street, where protesters shut down a march by the British Union of Fascists. But in the United States and Britain, Antifa grew in the 1980s primarily out of the punk rock scene. As Nazi and white supremacist skinheads became a bigger part of this largely un-policed subculture, far-leftists met violence with violence, calling it self-defense.
As it grew beyond punk, Antifa’s adherents organized through the now-defunct Anti-Racist Action network and now sometimes through the Torch Network, as well as other less visible groups. Many activists also aligned themselves with the broader anti-globalization movement. But Donald Trump’s election has become the catalyst launching Antifa into a broader political movement.
The Antifa members we’ve interviewed shun the Democratic Party label, saying their activism constitutes its own political orientation. They’re mostly anarchists and anarcho-communists, and they often refer to fellow protesters as “comrades.” Adherents typically despise the government and corporate America alike, seeing police as defenders of both and thus also legitimate targets.
The anti-fascist anarchist website CrimethInc.com recently summarized its philosophy: “In this state of affairs, there is no such thing as nonviolence—the closest we can hope to come is to negate the harm or threat posed by the proponents of top-down violence . . . so instead of asking whether an action is violent, we might do better to ask simply: does it counteract power disparities, or reinforce them?”
Antifa’s activists use the Orwellian-sounding notion of “anticipatory self-defense” to justify direct confrontation. That can include violence, vandalism and other unlawful tactics. Many draw a false moral distinction between damaging private property and “corporate” property.
Antifa activists have also developed their own moral justification for suppressing free speech and assembly. As anarchists, they don’t want state censorship. But they do believe it’s the role of a healthy civil society to make sure some ideas don’t gain currency.
So they heartily approve of the heckler’s veto, seeking to shut down speeches and rallies that they see as abhorrent. Antifa activists also search for and publicize damaging information on their targets or opponents, or launch campaigns pressuring their bosses or companies to fire those opponents.
Words don’t constitute violence, despite what Antifa activists believe. But there are dangerous ideas and practices, and the radical left has embraced several of them. Democracies solve conflict through debate, not fisticuffs. But Antifa’s protesters believe that some ideas are better fought with force, and that some people are incapable of reason.
Implicit in this view is that Antifa alone has the right to define who is racist, fascist or Nazi. It’s a guerilla twist on the culture wars, when a microaggression must be met with a macroaggression.
Antifa has also widely embraced “Black Bloc” tactics, including disguising themselves with black garb and covering their faces with bandanas and balaclavas. It’s not a good look for a supposedly anti-authoritarian group to show up in uniform, like the KKK in white hoods, much less armed with batons.
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Which brings us back to Berkeley. This weekend two right-wing groups sought to hold peaceful rallies. Their leaders—Patriot Prayer’s Joey Gibson, a Japanese-American, and Amber Cummings, a transgender Trump supporter—explicitly denounced racism. Amid fears of violence, both cancelled their events. Antifa showed up anyway, outnumbering and terrorizing any right-wingers or Trump supporters who dared show their faces.
Antifa views itself as fundamentally reactionary, as a necessary opposition to corrosive ideologies. But because your foe is a really bad guy doesn’t mean you’re inherently a good one. Movements are defined not merely by what they oppose but by what they do. Antifa’s censorious criminality resembles the very political behavior it claims to fight. The mainstream left ought to denounce it as much as the right should reject white supremacists.
2) Newsletter Distributed on College Campus Calls for Banning Veterans
A newsletter distributed at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs says veterans shouldn't be in college:
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