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:

Thanks - some imperfections then but if there was something even moderately bad I'm sure it would have been used against him by now.

I’d like to see some evidence before people continue down the defamation route. Weinstein has already been vindicated on the charge of racism so I’m not inclined to believe that he is a flirt without some evidence other than Reddit posts by the politically motivated.

Also, I follow several science blogs and his academic reputation is strong; where does this shit about riding his wife’s coat tails come from?

But surely being self important is a critical “flaw” if you are going to stand up to the tide that we see in the videos

And I have seen many interviews where both he and his wife say they made a decision to go to Evergreen because of the freedom of teaching methods. And that they preferred this to life in research.

I can't see much wrong with Bret Weinstein

Hey don't get me wrong. I was just passing on what I had read cos someone asked what the criticisms had been, hence the *shrug.
As I said, he always got great ratings from students on online rate-my-prof type sites, which is a good indicator.
I am still deep down the rabbit hole and love that some of my lifelong assumptions ate being challenged, mainly about the left.

"The anti-facists of today are the facists of tomorrow" Winston Churchill. That's where I'm at at present.

My most treasured former teacher is a self-important Professor who had left a previous institution under a bit of non-specific cloud. He made me a better thinker, debater and artist and was very generous with his time (and made me cry in tutorials at least twice). I learned more from him in a year-long masters than I did in 3 at Goldsmiths.

Surely we are all flawed? So mentioning that Weinstein wasn’t universally liked is simply a reminder to have no heroes - people are complicated.

One of the complaints I read (probably on the Evergreen Reddit but I forget) is that he used the staff round-Robin emailing list all the time (his rationale being that it was the only way to communicate with everyone - he says this in the 3 part doc that begins this thread). That must’ve been annoying to many of the people who regularly got his long, detailed, unsolicited messages 😂

Doesn’t make him fascist though!

Gah! who the fuck said he was a fascist!!! Surely it was obvious I was talking about the behaviour of the students.
I have nothing against the man! I am bloody grateful he took the stance he did.
Posts get taken out of context..... Mine have been in reply to a question asked on the previous page.

Apologies Betty that was grumpy.
I should have quoted PP question in my answer at top of this page, which was
What's the flaw in Bret Weinstein's character? Afaik he was a left-leaning professor who found himself at the centre of the maelstrom. Does he have a past I don't know about?

Ha! Don’t worry Yeah - I was just musing out loud in relation to various posts, not addressing any in particular, hence no quoting - I don’t think anyone here believes Weinstein is racist/fascist/a white supremacist, and you certainly haven’t given that impression!

I am still deep down the rabbit hole and love that some of my lifelong assumptions ate being challenged, mainly about the left.

Yes me too Yeah and I am finding it both interesting and deeply unsettling.

Lisa Muggeridge’s blogs/videos are valuable when considering how much this stuff is affecting the U.K. - can take a while to pick up all the narrative threads because she thinks in a stream of consciousness style (and posts unedited) but she’s really opened my eyes.

Links for LM: idgeofreason.wordpress.com/about/

Yes me too Yeah and I am finding it both interesting and deeply unsettling.

Yes, although, it struck me a little last night, the possibility that I don't actually have to believe in systemic institutional racism - at least not in the normal way it's described - seems like a real relief. It's bothered me for a while that the elements of institutional racism that seemed most clear to me were really class based - about the fact that African Americans are disproportionately members of the working class or the poor. Of course that has its own baggage, but it's baggage that you can look at a lot more clearly, I think.
The narrative a lot of these guys are suggesting seems to actually fit together with the evidence a little better, so it gets rid of a tension at that level. But it also, maybe a bit weirdly, I feel like it allows for the possibility of having relationships without there being all this weird baggage that is assumed to be there. Baggage which I don't think I ever noticed until I considered the possibility that it didn't exist, just within the last week. It's been sort of an odd experience, I'm not quite sure what to make of it.

Yes me too Yeah and I am finding it both interesting and deeply unsettling.

YY. I was very uncomfortable to begin with, but now find it almost.... exhilarating?
Now that I'm further down the line I can even re-examine my beliefs around (whispers) patriarcy, men's right movement, and feminism.
..I'll get my coat....

Now that I'm further down the line I can even re-examine my beliefs around (whispers) patriarcy, men's right movement, and feminism.
..I'll get my coat....

I've rethought my ideas on these things plenty of times over the years, sometimes in one direction, sometimes in another. Now I seem to be a weird mishmash of views. For what it's worth, I don't find the concept of patriarchy useful.

Hooray for this thread!

MN FWR boards are totally blind to these issues and you get instantly slated for not taking a 'women as a class' view and any talk of identity politics going wild / dangerous.

This podcast on 'systemic racism' with Sam Harris and Coleman Hughes is great and challenges what is on that Rubin clip further up

samharris.org/podcasts/134-beyond-politics-race/

Candace Owens and Josephine Mathias are two amazing black women worth listening/watching on youtube too.
Note: just because I have left the left does not entail I've joined the right.

I get the Larry Elder video above - and I am familiar with him. He is a clear voice to consider when discussing/considering racism in the US.

We can't deny that the American gentry produced several of our Founding Fathers - and many of them owned slaves or otherwise greatly benefited from those they saw as less.

Considering we had slavery/indentured servitude, the Trail of Tears/Wounded Knee Massacre/reservations, Japanese internment/concentration camps (Executive Order 9066), Chinese Exclusion Act, Tuskegee Study, and more - how can we deny that racism is embedded? Someone explain to me how these race-based Executive Orders, Acts of Congress, and studies conducted by our public health services... are not institutional racism?

I'm not saying that racism excludes people from attempting to achieve the 'American Dream' but I think there is inequity to this day as a result of how our nation came to be. I do believe that people can overcome their history (and/or ancestors' history).

I'm pragmatically concerned. I'd like public school history lessons accurately depicting our nation's history (all races and both sexes) and forward movement in the spirit of Shirley Chisholm.

The time is clearly now to put this House on record for the fullest expression of that equality of opportunity which our Founding Fathers professed. They professed it, but they did not assure it to their daughters, as they tried to do for their sons. The Constitution they wrote was designed to protect the rights of white, male citizens. As there were no black Founding Fathers, there were no founding mothers -- a great pity, on both counts. It is not too late to complete the work they left undone.
~Shirley Chisholm, RE: ERA, 1970

The students are getting the blame here, but it looks like they were manipulated by the administration and their teachers. Bret Weinstein alludes to it in the beginning of the documentary saying that the new President was looking to make changes at the college and this was the method he was using as the cover for reform. Unfortunately the documentary doesn't follow it up. No wonder it turned out like the cultural revolution when people further down the hierarchy were being given license to attack approved scapegoats. Top down revolutions are dangerous.

It doesn't surprise me at all that the white male president is still in place after engineering all this. Some things never change.

I thought the role of the president in all of that was sooo weird, and I could not easily see what he was trying to accomplish.

At first I thought he was trying to head in a ill defined social justice direction, but somehow it got out of control. But later, it looked like he was still encouraging what was going on and the students, even egging them on. And in ways that made no sense.

How could it be good for him to have the school degenerate in the way that was inevitable if they put their equity plans in place? How was it good to have the classes so disrupted, and his staff humiliated?

But the most crazy parts were when the students had the faculty members held in that room and he said he needed to pee - there was something really weird about his demeanour there. What did he think was going on? And then telling the campus police to stand down - that was actually irresponsible and could have totally backfired on him if there had been a disaster, which seems like it was a real possibility.
That guy totally creeped me out. But there seemed to be a few people, students and faculty, who were driving what was going on.

*We can't deny that the American gentry produced several of our Founding Fathers - and many of them owned slaves or otherwise greatly benefited from those they saw as less.

Considering we had slavery/indentured servitude, the Trail of Tears/Wounded Knee Massacre/reservations, Japanese internment/concentration camps (Executive Order 9066), Chinese Exclusion Act, Tuskegee Study, and more - how can we deny that racism is embedded? Someone explain to me how these race-based Executive Orders, Acts of Congress, and studies conducted by our public health services... are not institutional racism?

I'm not saying that racism excludes people from attempting to achieve the 'American Dream' but I think there is inequity to this day as a result of how our nation came to be. I do believe that people can overcome their history (and/or ancestors' history).*

I think though it is really important to define what "embedded racism" means when it's used like this. Because just stating it is there, without pointing to some material result - that could so easily be an illusion, and even if it isn't, it's not very useful. What to do about something so undefined? I also would like to see it differentiated carefully from the effects of class.
Slavery is a class structure, one that isn't always connected to race. It has consequences of its own in terms of what it means for those people whose families are or were caught there. These things can be a clear material manifestation of historical slavery without being manifestations of racism that remains inherent in society. I would also say that class prejudice is a real thing that can have an effect on people, and in the American experience racism is entwined very closely with racism. So you can have white families that suffer from class prejudice - that was a huge thing in some parts of the country, and if people knew your family chances are you would not have the opportunity to overcome it. If race is a sign of your class status, well, that is even more difficult to hide from. And the longer it goes on, the more the effects of class oppression, like crime statistics, become associated with race, because there will be a statistical correlation.

As far as I can see though, simply calling all this systemic racism hides more than it reveals. And what it especially hides is what kinds of things might make a real difference in addressing some of these problems. Because it is never going to be getting on the equity canoe that does that.

The president was in charge of the police who had the power to stop what was happening. He chose not to do it, so the responsibility for what happened rests with him. The "equity canoe" was his policy, it wouldn't have happened without his direction. He certainly created the environment for something like this to happen.

It wasn't clear what he was up to because the film didn't make it clear apart from Bret Weinstein's passing comment at the beginning that he was planning unpopular reforms. They did a poor journalistic job of investigation on that front.

Heather Heying seems to be somewhat anti-woman:

Toxic Femininity

Goosefoot

I agree with everything you said. I think using the word institutional is difficult yet accurate when looking at history - yet confusing and difficult to separate from class/caste present-day. I'm not from an affluent family. The color of my skin did not insulate me from sexual abuse or other things I have experienced but I do wonder if it insulates me on a level that I am not aware because of US history.

I would also say that class prejudice is a real thing that can have an effect on people, and in the American experience racism is entwined very closely with racism. So you can have white families that suffer from class prejudice - that was a huge thing in some parts of the country, and if people knew your family chances are you would not have the opportunity to overcome it. If race is a sign of your class status, well, that is even more difficult to hide from. And the longer it goes on, the more the effects of class oppression, like crime statistics, become associated with race, because there will be a statistical correlation.

Race is so entwined (as you said) with the American experience - it's very hard to separate that from class/caste discrimination. I want to see things clearly and not conflate things that don't belong together. I'm not an expert, I'm not a professor - I'm just an American trying to parse this out.

You seem to be the first person that's really engaging me on the subject - I thank you deeply for your consideration. I'm just trying to keep growing as a person - conversation helps to open directions of research I may not otherwise consider/encounter.

My parents' very different and diverse ancestries were not cause for their experiencing class-based prejudice, they had those experiences due to socioeconomic status. As you travel back through the generations of my lineage discrimination against my ancestors was a mix of race, religion, and socioeconomic factors.

Racism was thrown over my fence last week ("n" word and one guy called a liar as well) and while the guys working on storm debris certainly didn't need me to defend them or protect them - I had some words with the lady and denounced her behavior. I felt a need to protect my backyard from her words, for my household and my friends' children (beautiful-minded multi-lineage children that shouldn't be judged by anything beyond their merits... all being girls have enough to worry about). The lady that threw the racism is an elementary school teacher at a school down the road, would she speak that way to children? I don't know but I'm concerned she might.

This is all so complicated... I'm not sure how to be cognizant of our history, respectful of those facing today's racism, and separate classism without conflating somehow. Because statistics, because different people see it differently... because diversity (to me) is less about race and more about thought as no one in a group can truly represent the whole group.

We need clear definitions like you said - this country is running scared in so many directions.

Because it is never going to be getting on the equity canoe that does that.

No one really seemed to have any clue of what was going on in that video. I found it to be a bizarre spectacle.

Sorry for another super long post but I do want to thank you again for taking the time to consider and respond to my thoughts.

Another person people might be interested in reading, for a different take than they are used to on race issues, is Adolph J Reed. He's a poli-sci prof whose main interest is race in American politics. He is on the more skeptical or critical side with regard to antiracism, but unlike some of the others mentioned above, he's on the left, in the traditional sense or being very influenced by Marxist thought. I think he is, or was, very involved in Bernie Sander's campaign.

StopThePlanet

I'm glad to chat about this topic. It's almost unmentionable in public, and it's so difficult to get a collected set of thoughts together as a result of that.