{"id":6046,"date":"2017-09-02T10:37:08","date_gmt":"2017-09-02T17:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=6046"},"modified":"2017-09-02T10:37:08","modified_gmt":"2017-09-02T17:37:08","slug":"bret-weinstein-end-game-prosperity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/02\/bret-weinstein-end-game-prosperity\/","title":{"rendered":"BRET WEINSTEIN ON THE END GAME OF PROSPERITY"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cTyranny is the end game of prosperity.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2013Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an\u00a0outspoken supporter<\/a>\u00a0of the Occupy Wall Street movement.<\/p>\n

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You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as \u201cdeeply progressive,\u201d is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly\u00a0widespread campaign<\/a>\u00a0by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.<\/p>\n

This professor\u2019s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.<\/p>\n

A bit of background: The \u201cDay of Absence\u201d is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, \u201cin previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus \u2014 a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.\u201d This year, the script was flipped: \u201cWhite students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day\u2019s activities,\u201d\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color \u201cvoiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a\u00a0letter<\/a>\u00a0to Rashida Love, the school\u2019s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. \u201cThere is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.\u201d The first instance, he argued, \u201cis a forceful call to consciousness.\u201d The second \u201cis a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.\u201d In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was something more than that. It was an act of moral bullying \u2014 to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening. Perhaps there\u2019s a case to be made that a white-free day could be a useful way to highlight the lack of racial diversity, particularly at a proudly progressive school like Evergreen. Yet reasonable debate has made itself absent at Evergreen.<\/p>\n

For expressing his view, Mr. Weinstein was confronted outside his classroom last week by a group of some 50 students insisting he was a racist. The\u00a0video<\/a>\u00a0of that exchange \u2014 \u201cYou\u2019re supporting white supremacy\u201d is one of the more milquetoast quotes \u2014 must be seen to be believed. It will make anyone who believes in the liberalizing promise of higher education quickly lose heart. When a calm Mr. Weinstein tries to explain that his only agenda is \u201cthe truth,\u201d the students chortle.<\/p>\n

Following the protest, college police, ordered by Evergreen\u2019s president to\u00a0stand down<\/a>, told Mr. Weinstein they couldn\u2019t guarantee his safety on campus. In the end, Mr. Weinstein held his biology class in a public park. Meantime, photographs and names of his students were\u00a0circulated<\/a>\u00a0online. \u201cFire Bret\u201d\u00a0graffiti<\/a>\u00a0showed up on campus buildings. What was that about safe spaces?<\/p>\n

Watching the way George Bridges, the president of Evergreen, has handled this situation put me in mind of a line from Allan Bloom\u2019s book \u201cThe Closing of the American Mind.\u201d Mr. Bloom was writing about administrators\u2019 reaction to student radicals in the 1960s, but he might as well be writing about Evergreen: \u201cA few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.\u201d<\/p>\n

At a town hall meeting, Mr. Bridges\u00a0described<\/a>\u00a0the protestors as \u201ccourageous\u201d and expressed his gratitude for \u201cthis catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed.\u201d Of course, there was also pablum about how \u201cfree speech must be fostered and encouraged.\u201d But if that\u2019s what Mr. Bridges really believes, why isn\u2019t he doing everything in his power to protect a professor who exercised it and condemn the mob that tried to stifle him?<\/p>\n

The Weinstein saga is just the latest installment in a series of similar instances of illiberalism on American campuses. In March, a planned\u00a0speech<\/a>\u00a0by Charles Murray at Middlebury ended with the political scientists escorted off campus by police and his interviewer, Professor Allison Stanger, in a\u00a0neck brace<\/a>. In April, a speech at Claremont McKenna by the conservative writer\u00a0Heather Mac Donald<\/a>\u00a0had to be livestreamed when protestors blocked access to the auditorium.<\/p>\n

Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives. Liberals shouldn\u2019t cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what\u2019s liberalism about?<\/p>\n