Evergreen State College, Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying 3 part documentary

[PencilsInSpace]

This has been touched on in other threads but I thought it deserved its own now part 3 of Mike Nayna's documentary is up.

It's only tangentially related to feminism but postmodernist cultural theory and queer theory are the background to the transagenda (see for example No Outsiders) as well as the 'sex work' movement, 'sex positive' movement, surrogacy, transhumanism etc.

These videos show what happens when a group of students steeped in those theories decide to put them into practice. It's ugly as fuck. It looks like the start of the Chinese cultural revolution.

In a few years these dreadful spoilt children will have gained influential roles in campaigning non-profit organisations and will be advising various levels of government (cf. Jess Bradley).

Bret Weinstein's final words in part 3 are chilling.

3 x half hour episodes -

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Is Social Justice a Cultural Revolution Reboot?

I have made previous posts about removing my glasses and walking into lampposts.

I have also dipped into the Rubn Report and Sam Harris. Are there any women IDW writers / podcasters?

IIRC Alice Dreger was interviewed and, I think, even photographed for the original IDW feature, but asked not to be included just before publication.

Her book Galileo's Middle Finger explores the impact that identity politics is having on science, in particular the science around transgenderism.

It’s very good.

Thanks always I just dipped in via a YouTube interview.
Interesting that she thought another reason for the shutdown of freespeech on campus was due to colleges worried about fallout with their corporate partnerships.
Also that it was mainly women who lost their teaching positions amid controversy.

"Our local political and community organisations have been infiltrated by a group of well meaning white middle class goldsmith (uni) students. These people although well intentioned have rail roaded many vital projects by introducing identity policies and intersectional thinking. They do this without truly understanding or experiencing working class issues."

An excellent article, but I would take issue with the words "well meaning" and replace them with "divisive" and "self serving", and suggest that they are not at all interested in the problems of working class people.
Goldsmiths - wonder who that could be?
"Now then, now then"

Pencils - yes you might be right about scholarship. I don't think I have understood what gender studies actually is all these years. I thought it was where people from different disciplines use the methods of their own discipline to study gender, but I'm wondering if it has broken loose and is now a discipline in its own right - but using what methodology?

There is some 2nd wave-esque feminism holding on for dear life. Rosa Freedman organised an eventwith three talks about gender critical feminism. Audio is here:
thegendercritic.com/

I have now watched the 3 films about Everygreen. Blimey O'Reiley.

What exactly is a Liberal Arts College? Anyone know?

Gender studies is absolutely a discipline now in its own right. I expect Camille Paglia is controversial here, but she makes some pretty spot on criticisms of gender studies departments, the foremost one being they are completely divorced from the sciences. In fact her whole description of what academia has become is a pretty crystallised description of the stuff that went on at Evergreen and which seems to be infecting many other institutions. I especially like the way she describes how the old guard in the universities failed to engage publicly with the post-modernists and so allowed them to take over:

"However, it is indeed difficult to understand why major professors already in safe, powerful positions avoided direct combat. For example, although he had made passing dismissive remarks about post-structuralism (“Foucault and soda water”), Harold Bloom never systematically engaged or critiqued the subject or used his access to the general media to endorse debate, which was left instead to self-identified conservatives. The latter situation was clearly counterproductive, insofar as it enabled the bourgeois faux leftists of academe to define themselves and their reflex gobbledygook as boldly progressive."

Oh, a liberal arts college is like a small university, usually, which tends to focus on the humanities. Traditionally it also includes pure sciences and maths, but you may not see so much of that at a liberal arts college. They tend to focus on undergraduates more than some of the larger American universities.
American universities in general have become very much like large businesses focused on practical ends, and undergraduate programs in the humanities can be very fractured, just a bunch of unrelated classes that tick boxes. Liberal arts colleges are meant to give a more integrated foundation.

It amazes me that a college of 4,000 students (now down to 3,000, because of all this nonsense) has it’s own designated campus police.

To put it in persepective, the only HE establishments of this sort of size are the few remaining independent art schools and colleges who had traditionally specialist backgrounds, many of which have a high percentage of postgraduate students.

(Screenshot from Wikipedia - columns are: 1st, number of undergrads 2nd, number of post grads, 3rd, total students on role).

It’s impossible to tell from the actual footage, because no one ever seems to properly verbalise what they are actually angry about, but if you look at the timeline in context of American politics it makes a bit more sense - the day that the Purce Hall dedication takes place (when the protestors grab the microphone and refuse to let the (black) former Evergreen president, is the day after Trump’s election, when spontaneous protests were taking place all over the US.
The 2016 election was, of course, very divisive, and the previous years had seen a number of street protests and unrest in response to the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

I don’t think many people would disagree that there is an institutional racism problem within US police forces, similar to the problems here that were documented by the MacPherson Inquiry.
It’s understandable that young black people felt angry, and other young people wanted to support their friends and peers in fighting for change.

(I’m a big fan of Colin Kaepernick btw - www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/sports/colin-kaepernick-nfl-protests.html )

The thing is, young people don’t have anything much to fight with, except anger, energy, and (misplaced) righteousness. They don’t have the funds or contacts to influence law makers, they don’t have the political nouse or knowledge to navigate their way through systems of local and national government, they don’t have the journalistic contacts to speak through proper publications.

What they do have, however, is social media.

Whipped up into anger by various current events, magnified and multiplied via social media, then enabled by the virtual signalling, white-guilt college faculty, these angry kids felt so wronged, that they actively looked for stuff to feel wronged by. Of course, most kids doing a degree at an arts college don’t have that much to actually be angry about, so that’s where all this micro aggression bullshit comes in, it’s a way to justify their anger. The black kids on campus got aggrieved about stuff that there was little evidence for - perceived unfair treatment by campus cops, or by academic staff.
The new college president thought the way to heal the unrest was by resolving their problems, problems that couldn’t actually be resolved because no one could find any material evidence for them. Hence the stupid and obviously inaffective ‘Equity Canoe’, leading to more anger that ‘nothing is being done’, whipped up by the election of Trump, and encouraged and legitimised by the shouty lecturer with the little dog

The response to all this anger is to give the angry kids more power (putting them on councils and decision making committees) but the kids don’t want mere equality, they want ‘social justice’ (and here we find parallels with the demands of the batshit Action for Trans Health), they want recompense for their suffering - people with privilege need to give directly to the marginalised - White/straight/cis people need to sit down and stop talking and hand over their assets, whether that be cash or domestic violence refuges.

And yes, white, mostly straight, men have done most of the talking and most of the decision making for most of US/UK history, but we can’t throw out the entire body of human knowledge to date because it was mostly written by white men (or white men took credit for it, regardless of who did it) and you can’t stop the current generation of white/cis/straights from participating in the present and the future because ‘it’s someone else’s turn now’.

Instead of the meritocracy-with-welfare-safety-net that most of us thought we thought we were working towards, we are instead hurtling towards a time where the only people allowed to speak/participate/have an opinion are the most marginalised - except the truly marginalised are too busy wondering how long that pound is going to last on the electric meter and if they can get a voucher for the food bank again already.
Hence we get people who tick some marginalised boxes (or identify into them) but who still have oodles of privilege (like black, trans Munroe Burgdorf, who is middle class, male and privately educated) doing all the fucking talking, while not actually addressing any real, on the ground problems.

Unsurprising, because you can’t address problems if you haven’t noticed them, and you won’t notice them if you have neither lived experience, nor professional experience. And thinking of yourself as the most oppressed ever robs you of the intellectual curiosity to look for other people’s problems, and the empathy required to solve them.

That’s why women need women as political representation, not men with a feminine gender identity.

(Didn’t mean to write so much stream-of-consciousness on a tiny phone screen without my reading specs - it’s probably riddled with mistakes)

Screenshot didn’t post:

I feel sorry for all the ordinary students having to put up with these idiots.

problems that couldn’t actually be resolved because no one could find any material evidence for them ... leading to more anger that ‘nothing is being done’

This is familiar. Identify problems that, in the specific form they've been identified, don't exist, angrily demand solutions, and when they're not forthcoming, use that as a platform to generate frothing rage about the failure to solve the problems. Then go hunting for scalps.

I feel sorry for all the ordinary students having to put up with these idiots.

So do I. If I were looking to recruit bright young things from universities, seeing Evergreen State College on a CV would make me think twice about putting that CV in the "possibles" pile.

Betty I agree with do much of your post.

Unsurprising, because you can’t address problems if you haven’t noticed them, and you won’t notice them if you have neither lived experience, nor professional experience. And thinking of yourself as the most oppressed ever robs you of the intellectual curiosity to look for other people’s problems, and the empathy required to solve them.

And that's the problem.

Exactly.

The U.K. can’t do anything about transwomen being murdered at astronomical rates, because there is no material evidence that this is happening.

What gets me, is that in the areas where there really is obvious inequality for trans people, such as the HIV rate in black, trans identifying males in the USA*, none of the big TRA voices seem to give a rats arse.

Of course, it doesn’t affect middle class, privately educated, media industry types in the U.K, and especially not ones who only have sex with biological women, so they probably haven’t even noticed it.

*Latest figures estimate 44% - it’s fucking heartbreaking.
www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/gender/transgender/index.html

It's amazing isn't it? Because there are supposedly astronomic numbers of trans young people committing suicide, or attempting to do so, then any measure that might safeguard women and children in the conflict of rights must be dispensed with.

But of course, it's transphobic to ask for clarification of these astronomic numbers, they have to be taken on faith. Anyone seeking to clarify what's going on in order to act appropriately needs to be sacked.

I do wonder where they get their inspiration from. Did the committee at Evergreen come up with all this themselves (doubt it) or did some students attend some sort of symposium, did some more experienced activists stir up everyone else on campus, etc etc.

I'm really trying to avoid the temptations of tinfoil but, nuts, as it was, they did seem to get going very quickly and it didn't all come from a vacuum.

My observation in the university I'm associated with, and elsewhere, is that a lot seems to originate within student unions. But I do not know what influences they are under.

it didn't all come from a vacuum.

In the second clip posted by the OP at about 4mins in it is highlighted how some of the college lecturers themselves were including “grievance studies” into their courses. The video clip is called “teaching to transgress”.

A pp mentioned the Boghossian (et al) hoaxes where three academics managed to get seven papers published or accepted for publication in respected peer reviewed journals in (what the academics christened) “grievance studies” – gender, sexuality, queer, race and fat studies. The papers were nothing more than exercises in ludicrous circular sophistry but were written with a particular rhythm and cadence common to all these studies.

In the following YouTube clip they describe how they could not merely write nonsense in order to have their papers accepted– it had to be framed in a particular way common to all these studies. It is the language of religion – opposed to objective analysis- a faith-based system in which privilege is equated with sin and the marginalised raised up as the persecuted faithful – the martyrs of the movement as opposed to flawed human beings facing quantifiable discrimination.

This is how this ideology is being spread – through all manner of university courses up and down the land. This is why free speech and reasoned debate is being shut down and such things as the No Outsiders programme are being incubated at Universities like Sunderland and then spread through primary schools so that very young children are indoctrinated into the cult at the earliest opportunity.

It only needs then the slightest nudge and you have a situation of violence that is very reminiscent of the Stanford prison experiment.

These grievance studies courses can trace their academic lineage back to Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jaques Derrida, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. These postmodern philosophers tried to use their academic authority to lobby governments to decriminalise adult-child sexual contact as part of their attempts to break down the prevailing system of heteronormative social control. They began the concerted attempt to smash anything deemed to be “bourgeois” – now for “bourgeois” you can interject any number of words “white”, “terf” – anything that smacks of the old order because we are now marching towards the new.

Great post Betty.

The Student Unions have always been bastion of batshittery though - the difference is that the grown ups in the actual universities used to keep a lid on it.
I’m thinking the stuff that’s happening in universities is more of a perfect storm situation than a shadowy AstroTurf puppet-master one, although I expect various shadowy hands have meddled in various locations to maximise their own gain.

I’m now planning to watch Benjamin Boyce’s Evergreen videos from the start (he has a playlist in the order he posted them, 88 videos so far). I’m used to his rather gentle interviews of trans people and therapists, so it’s interesting to hear his own back story and initial opinions on what erupted at Evergreen, filmed pretty much off the cuff in the college library, a couple of weeks after the protests.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=bafjepm_EYo&list=PLRdayXEOwuMHunObL39uaJMYDxs4-Sxkw&index=2&t=0s

I've thought on this for a while, particularly in terms of the shenanigans at Goldsmiths. What is noticeable about Goldsmiths is that the student body changed dramatically in the noughties. Where the college was once a place where students too alternative, subcultural and free thinking for Oxbridge ended up, it became a place where very conformist and privileged students with a lot of money and whom had been tutored beyond belief to pass exams started to apply.

I know, for example, that some of the more intensive critical UG options in the humanities had to fold because the students couldn't cope with the material.

And it's made we wonder whether part of the problem could be that in the noughties and since, a lot of very privileged children were specifically taught through the independent and grammar school system to recognise that there were others less fortunate than them. This is very much the era of such schools beginning to run charity-work trips to Africa etc.

But I wonder if this approach has weirdly backfired, and created a postmodern version of "the white man's burden" where power and privilege in itself comes out of recognising and advocating for the underprivileged. Its a kind of modern Mrs Jellabyism. They define themselves and absorb the satisfaction of their privilege through advocating for those they perceive as less than they.

For example, it strikes me that privileged students from Goldsmiths interfering with Deptford projects is eerily similar to pupils going to Africa and painting villagers' doors without permission. Back in the 80s and 90s, Goldsmiths students wouldn't have dared do something like that.

I went to Goldsmiths right in the middle of that change - I was a mature student, a single mum, living on a council estate that had been branded the ‘The Heroin Capital of Europe’.

I didn’t make very many friends 😂

It was like being trapped in Pulp’s Common People for 3 years.

I shall have a think about your post PackingSoap while I go off and walk the dog, although my first instinct is to describe it not as a misguided benevolent relationship, but as a parasitical one, fetishising and then attempting to consume working class people and alternative subcultures, entirely for their own benefit.

Actually, now I have typed that out, it does seem like a similar psychological satisfaction is in play!

There’s a good article over at Areo today called Why We Join Cults that I think is relevant:

areomagazine.com/2019/04/26/why-we-join-cults/

Institutional racism is pervasive throughout almost every organization in the US. If you live here and you don't see it you're walking around with your eyes and mind's eye closed. Racism is part of every single thing (even if far removed) that has been developed or built in the US.

The above doesn't mean that every 'white' American has racist roots. Even if one has racist roots they likely have mixed heritage including people the US systematically oppresses/oppressed. My own ancestry is ripe with the oppressed and their oppressors.

This grievance studies take seeks to punish for oppressor heritage many Americans do not have. Yes the oppressors set up a system that created an enduring (so far) level of privilege based on skin color - it can't be denied. Yes that needs to change but it won't change through shaming and forcing people to apologize for atrocities they haven't committed.

This Evergreen movement is not so far removed from TRA (regardless of their own privilege) as they seek to punish those they perceive as their oppressors. Within these bubbles they are pressing outward and attempting to encapsulate every corner of the nation and seem to be consistently gaining traction.