by Daniel Greenfield
The greatest threat to freedom is on campus.
“I’m George Bridges, I use he/him pronouns.”
That was how the president of Evergreen State College, a man with a PhD in Sociology, an MA in Criminology and the backbone of an incontinent weasel began his apology to the radical leftists who had terrorized his school, shouted racial slurs at a professor and other students, and driven an entire class off campus. Then he paid respect to the “elders past and present of the Squaxin Island Tribe.”
The university was once a place of reason and learning. It is now a sick, sad totalitarian joke.
From now on all official Evergreen State events must begin by stating that it is built on stolen Indian land. The president’s pronoun was an admission of his cisgender privilege. It was the first of a series of ritual humiliations that he would undergo. And no one deserved them more than George Bridges.
Bridges had been the author of an op-ed titled, "Why students need trigger warnings and safe places". Now he had to stand there while the leftist crybullies he had been sheltering shouted, “F__ you George; we don’t wanna listen to a goddamn thing you have to say! No, you shut the f___ up.”
And the President of Evergreen State College expressed his gratitude "for the passion and courage you have shown me".
"I apologize... I will commit to working on my own racism....I am a work in progress,” he mumbled.
The latest explosion of leftist racism at Evergreen State College began when Kai-Avé Douvia, a Puerto Rican/Native American student, spoke out against left-wing racism by Black Nationalists.
“My friends have received threats as well as been targets for mass attacks on social media, and have been forced to flee campus, even the city, out of fear,” Douvia wrote. "I have been confronted in the cafeteria and violently threatened with someone mere inches from my face shouting."
The police were called due to threats against Douvia. The allies of the Black students accused of threatening Douvia invaded police services and began a larger campaign against the campus police.
Shortly thereafter Professor Bret Weinstein refused a demand that white faculty and students leave campus on the Day of Absence / Day of Presence. In an email to Rashida Love, Director of the First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services, the respected biology professor called it an act of oppression.
"On a college campus, one’s right to speak--or to be--must never be based on skin color," Weinstein suggested.
This controversial notion was met by a howling lynch mob of social justice activists accusing him of “anti-blackness”. Anti-blackness, unlike racism, is defined as any opposition to the racist ideology of Black Nationalism. At the Day of Absence, this ideology demanded that white people must be banished.
In 2017, racial segregation was back. And it had the support of the administration.
Professor Weinstein tried to talk to the social justice crybullies about the search for truth. They blocked him from leaving, jeered and called him a racist. The situation grew so ugly that the police had to be called. And then they marched around chanting, “Hey-hey! Ho-ho! Bret Weinstein has got to go!”
They meant it.
Campus police warned Weinstein that they couldn’t protect him. Trying to protect him had led Officer Timothy O’Dell to become a target. The list of demands by the leftist thugs, many of which Bridges would comply with, insisted that “Officer Timothy O’Dell be fired and suspended without pay”.
The illiterate demands claimed that "O’Dell was asked to stopped and students expressed that they weren’t dangerous.” Bridges sided with the thugs over his own professor, students and police.
Weinstein had to hold his class in a park. “The police told me I am not safe on campus. They cannot protect me. Students in jeopardy. No contact from admin,” he wrote.
His students showed up, but they were also being targeted. The professor posted a screenshot by a social justice activist offering to share the “names and faces of students in Bret’s class”.
Instead of protecting the students, George Bridges turned Evergreen over to the social justice thugs.
The thugs targeted the police and the student code for inhibiting their abuses. They lobbed bizarre politically correct charges at the police. "Black trans disabled students are actively being sought out and confronted by campus police constantly." And they sought veto power over the student code.
They wanted "5 black students to inhabit a Student Code of Conduct Task Force" that would have veto power and be paid $500 a quarter. That was followed by, "we demand that no one is charged with a student code of conduct violation until these revisions are finalized." And they got their way.
Bridges said that no one was being charged with code of conduct violations for the “protests”. And he promised that students would be paid to help revise the student code of conduct. He refused to sell all the police weapons to fund the demands, but he imposed mandatory sensitivity training on the faculty.
There was one especially ominous demand.
Videos of the abuse had taken the story beyond the Cooper Point Journal; a student newspaper that didn’t even pretend to be anything more than a mouthpiece for leftist thuggery. And the abusers wanted that lifeline to the truth shut down. Unfortunately, the administration was on their side.
The demands included the insistence that a video “edited to expose and ridicule the students and staff be taken down by the administration this Friday.” Bridges replied, “We commit to launching an extensive forensic investigation of the theft of this video and to determining who stole it from the student. If that investigation yields a suspect, we will seek criminal charges against the individual in consultation with the Attorney General.”
The legal premise is absurd. But this was a college president helping racist thugs cover up video evidence of their actions by attacking the First Amendment and intimidating whistleblowers.
George Bridges’ support for safe spaces climaxed with racial segregation, racist intimidation of students and faculty, mandatory indoctrination and the dismantling of the student code of conduct.
Evergreen State College has become a racist hellhole that is dangerous to students and faculty. Safe spaces make everyone except identity politics thugs unsafe. These protests were aimed at making sure that campus police and the student code of conduct would no longer be able to protect students and faculty from racist intimidation. They even wanted to punish anyone leaking video of their hate.
And they succeeded.
All the barriers to racist terror at Evergreen State College have been dismantled. And the institutional precedents are disturbing.
The calls for safe spaces often seem absurd. They are mocked as the entitlement of “snowflakes”. But safe spaces are not where the weak and vulnerable retreat. They are expanding spaces of abuse. From Mizzou to Evergreen, we have seen how the call for safe spaces is a shield for intimidation and violence.
Totalitarian systems abuse their victims in secrecy. The difference between the hateful slurs on the videos and the media coverage is that of the gap between the gulags and the whitewashing of the USSR.
“My ancestors were all European Jews, primarily from Russia, Poland, and Ukraine. European Jews like my ancestors have faced repeated waves of anti-Semitic persecution stretching back at least as far as the 3rd century B.C.E. The most recent wave was at its height a mere 25 years before my birth. The Nazis were then at the peak of their “final solution to the Jewish question," Weinstein wrote.
The new Nazism finds its expression on the campuses once packed with the students who had defeated it. It is a tragic irony that the greatest totalitarian threat to freedom of speech in this country can be found among the leafy quads and glass and steel buildings of the modern liberal arts college.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.
Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/266867/evergreen-states-racist-safe-space-hell-daniel-greenfield
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