By Matthew Vadum ——Bio and Archives--November 17, 2015
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Columbia student activists are pestering peers to attend campus protests and walk-outs in solidarity with college students at Missouri and Yale or risk social isolation, students say. Organizers posted flyers and sent Facebook messages inviting undergraduates to wear black clothing and join two demonstrations last Thursday to support people of color who are "marginalized and threatened." But some students worried they would be "ostracized" if they did not participate or dress in sync, one college parent said. "There's been a campaign of intimidation, where students are going dorm to dorm, floor to floor and asking students to go back to their dorms and put on black if they're not wearing black," the parent said. "My daughter told me people are uneasy and fearful," she added. "Her personal politics are left-wing and she shares their sympathies, but she doesn't like to feel that she can't wear blue if she wants to wear blue." A protest leader led an angry mob in a series of chants, including "I love black people," "I love queer black people," "I love black criminals," and "I love black people who steal."At Yale and elsewhere, student mobs have been spitting on conservatives and gunning for administrators' heads. Campus leftists disrupted a Yale conference on free speech named after alumnus William F. Buckley Jr. a week ago and terrorized attendees as part of a lingering protest against school administrators' allegedly permissive attitude toward culturally insensitive Halloween costumes. After Yale's Intercultural Affairs Committee urged students to steer clear of Halloween costumes that could be perceived as having racial overtones such as "feathered headdresses, turbans, wearing 'war paint' or modifying skin tone or wearing black face or red face," a lower-level administrator countermanded that advice, urging students to lighten up. Lecturer Erika Christakis, associate master of Yale's Silliman College and spouse of Silliman College Master Nicholas Christakis, urged students not to worry about whether costumes might offend someone. "If you don't like a costume someone is wearing, look away, or tell them you are offended," she wrote in a mass email. "Talk to each other. Free speech and the ability to tolerate offense are the hallmarks of a free and open society." Of course this led to a tense confrontation with students in which an unhinged young black woman hysterically demanded Mr. Christakis be ousted. In a profanity-laden tirade captured on a now-viral video, she accused him of creating an "unsafe space" at the university. It was his "job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman," she said. "You should step down! If that is what you think of being headmaster, you should step down! It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not!" she cried out. At Mizzou, not doing enough about alleged incidents of supposed racism that were likely fabricated or staged by activists, cost university president Tim Wolfe his job. Wolfe took "full responsibility for this frustration" and said he hoped his resignation would help to "heal" whatever it was he did. Red Guards may as well have put a sign describing his crimes around his neck and paraded him about campus. The same day, R. Bowen Loftin, the similarly embattled chancellor, said he would resign at year's end. A month ago Loftin announced mandatory "diversity and inclusion" brainwashing for students, faculty, and staff. President Obama is fine with all of this mob activity. He offers perfunctory denunciations of violence in a monotone while expressing his sympathy for the mob and whatever its current cause may be. The unspoken message to his fellow rabble-rousers is: bombs away! Without his blessing, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and the newly emboldened iteration of the campus thought police might never have arisen. And if Obama weren't president right now, he would be out in the streets orchestrating the violence instead of leaving all the fun to the other community organizers.
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Matthew Vadum, matthewvadum.blogspot.com, is an investigative reporter.
His new book Subversion Inc. can be bought at Amazon.com (US), Amazon.ca (Canada)
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