90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #875

85 times campus cancel culture took down speakers, scholars, statues and more in 2022

Campus cancel culture continued to be a force to be reckoned with in higher education, with 85 victims of the woke mentality and another 47 attempted cancelations over the last 12 months.

In sum, The College Fix’s Campus Cancel Culture Database tracked a total of 132 examples of the weaponized phenomenon, an average of more than two incidents per week in 2022.

“For those who think cancel culture was just a fad, it’s not, and we’ve got the receipts,” said Jennifer Kabbany, editor of The College Fix. “Campus crybullies — and the administrators who enable them — continue to wreak havoc on academic freedom and free speech.”

The database was launched in September 2021 with more than 1,400 entries and currently sits at 1,617 entries.

It defines cancel culture as any effort by people or groups to identify someone or something as offensive or unacceptable and seek in some way to censor or punish the transgressor or item.

The database tracks and quantifies both successful cancelations as well as attempted efforts, which can still have a chilling effect on freedom of thought.

Some of the most high-profile cancelations over the last year include:

• a New York University chemistry professor who was fired for tough teaching;

• a mob of demonstrators who shouted down a Q&A with incoming University of Florida President Ben Sasse;

• left-wing rioters who forced Tomi Lahren into hiding, ending her speech at the University of New Mexico;

• State University of New York at New Paltz students kicked out of a sex abuse survivors group over their Jewish identity;

• the successful protest that prompted Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to back out of teaching a law class at George Washington University;

• Texas State University’s axing of the “Bluebonnet Lady of Texas” dorm name due to her Daughters of Confederacy link;

• a top female scientist who lost her university position over her 13-year-old “Michael Jackson” Halloween costume;

• and Georgetown University’s suspension of a prominent law scholar for his tweet criticizing President Biden’s “affirmative action” Supreme Court nomination process.

The year’s cancel culture victims also included a campus nickname — George Washington University’s “Colonials” is gone — and honorary degrees scrapped, namely Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani.

Building names and other monikers also took a big hit in 2022 with nine cancelations, including the decision by some schools to remove the word “women” from clinic names to promote diversity.

Several paintings also got the toss, including a portrait of Robert E. Lee from West Point and a depiction of old white men smoking cigars mothballed at from Leiden University.

Tenured professors remained under fire when they stepped out of line. Longtime Princeton University classics Professor Joshua Katz was fired in May, ostensibly for not cooperating with a probe of his sexual relationship with an undergrad 15 years ago. But the truth was he offended the Black Lives Matter crowd.

Convocation speeches also served as targets, with two shut down this year, one at...

The 90 Miles Mystery Video: Nyctophilia Edition #1253

Before You Click On The "Read More" Link,

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The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #1953

You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?

It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,

from the beautiful to the repugnant,

from the mysterious to the familiar.

If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,

you could be inspired, you could be appalled.

This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.

You have been warned.

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #867 New Year's Eve Edition

13 Big Predictions for 2023

The year ahead will provide lots of intrigue, controversy, volatility, and danger. You read it here first.

Hold on to your seat. But, please, don’t take any of this so literally that you bank on it or sell all of your possessions and move to the top of a mountain to wait in vain for some finale.

Truth is, I am not Nostradamus and I have no crystal ball. I did, however, get paid big bucks heading up consulting at Wharton Econometrics, where I was asked to “invent the future” for corporate strategy clients.

So, I thought I would conjure up a special set of predictions for American Greatness readers about what might be coming in 2023. You won’t get this from the three-letter government agencies who are so one-sided nowadays, or from any of our proliferating enemies or frenemies, for that matter.

These predictions are based on analysis and perspective guided by trends. The context is late-stage secularism and decadent crony capitalism, where wokeism is the default ideology.

The year ahead will provide plenty of intrigue, controversy, volatility, and danger. The pundits are all focused on the fall of Trump—which won’t exactly happen—but there are lots of other traps and challenges galore.

Here then, from my strategist-scholar-diplomat perch, is a list of the things that I predict for the year ahead. Some are commonsensical and others . . . well, quite out of this world.

13) Sadly, Hunter Biden will not be locked up. The Big Guy should be impeached on a raft of charges, but it won’t happen because of the complicity of the conspiracists. Big Tech, the press, the uniparty, and the deep state don’t want this result, as is all too apparent now. They will do everything to thwart justice and to both keep it out of the news and unprosecuted. Daddy would pardon him anyway, since he is “the smartest person he knows,” and that’s how he pays all his bills. Bring on all the investigations and congressional hearings—to no avail.

12) Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX Ponzi scheme will be exposed for what it is. A Democrat racket to win the election and maintain their power. Sure, a million people lost their shirts but that’s small potatoes in the grand scheme of power. SBF will be locked up after making bail and crashing at his unprecedented home arrest, and will be made the stupid fall guy (kid) for a totally corrupt system. They say he will go to Epstein’s cell on Rikers Island, and we all know what happened there. He deserves it. But really . . . crime pays if you want to rig an election, get momentarily rich, or fleece lots of people.

11) Both U.S. political parties will see contested leadership races. We already see this in Harmeet Dhillon’s legitimate challenge to the incumbent RINOs at the Republican National Committee. The Democrats are no longer a liberal bastion. They are split between democratic socialists and communists. The presidential primaries on both sides are going to be a blood fest. Biden will run based on his fake bio and he will have a half-dozen challengers, all trying to unseat him, as senile and inept. In the end, he will fold, and the Cackler, Kamala Harris, will be crowned queen as a happy compromise. Obama backs her, remember?

On the Republican side, Trump is fading faster than Santa after Christmas. The base may still, wink, wink, “support” him. But they have had enough, NFT trading cards and all. There are probably just short of a dozen challengers gearing up to take him on this year—some of whom were his lieutenants. Ron DeSantis will win the primaries and be the Republican nominee in 2024.

10) Aliens will invade us. Well, they already have at the southern border. But with fully open borders and no Title 42 or “remain in Mexico” policy, the Texas and Arizona border— especially along the Rio Grande—will allow 10 million more illegal aliens into the country, swelling cities and harming infrastructure, costing billions, while enriching the Mexican drug cartels and human traffickers. America will be a changed place demographically, as is Biden’s intent. The UFO thing will also get a buzz, and the in-crowd will also object to referring to them as “aliens.”

9) The culture will become more debased, evil, and plain pornographic. Just watch the HBO series “White Lotus” if you want to peer at where we are. It is all on display, and we shrug it off, saying, “so what?” Nearing the stage of Rome in its final days, we watch as the foundations of civilization are burned to the ground, desecrated, and Nero, or in this case his distant relative, Biden, fiddles. There is no such thing as truth. Beauty is a figment of subjective imagination. And goodness, rooted in reason, is relative. As Gollum, in Lord of the Rings insightfully reminded us, “They cursed us. Murderer they called us. They cursed us and drove us away. And we wept, Precious, we wept to be so alone.”

8) We will see the continuation of innovations and developments in transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR), cloud computing, blockchain, and super-fast network protocols, like 5G. According to an International Data Corporation (IDC) report, the AI industry is predicted to reach $7.8 billion, rising at a compound annual growth rate of 20.2 percent. By the end of 2025, the AI software category will have dominated the market, growing at a CAGR of 18.1 percent from $2.8 billion in just 2020. AI will be integrated all over—from marketing to branding and from voting to censorship and healthcare. Get your implant in 2023! It will be even better than the mRNA vaccines!

7) Nuclear war will be...

Just days after Christmas, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention republished a “self-assessment tool” urging teachers, administrators, school health staff, and others to become an “awesome ally” by advocating for LGBT causes in school.

The document cites multiple LGBT activist groups, including a division of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The CDC did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment about the document, which it originally published in October 2020.

“School administrators: Our LGBTQ inclusivity self-assessment tool can help you quickly gauge inclusivity at your school,” the CDC’s Division of Adolescent and School Health posted on Twitter on Tuesday. “See your score today and learn ways to increase inclusivity.”

The document, “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool,” appears on the CDC’s youth website in a section “For Schools” and under the drop-down “Tools for Supporting LGBTQ Youth.”

“Schools play a critical role in supporting the health and academic development of all youth, including the success of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) youth,” the document states. “Creating and sustaining inclusive school environments, policies, programs, and practices that include LGBTQ youth is one strategy for improving the health and academic success of all youth.”

The document notes that it includes resources from nongovernmental organizations “focused on improving school inclusivity” and that the resources do not represent the CDC’s official opinion. The document further notes that the self-assessment tool is optional, not required, but it touts the document as “a focused, reasonable, and user-friendly approach to identify strategies to increase LGBTQ inclusivity in schools.”

The tool includes four assessments, one each for all users, administrators, educators, and school health services staff. The tool includes three scores: “Commit to Change,” “Beginning to Break Through,” and “Awesome Ally.”

LGBTQ inclusivity continuum, screenshot from “LGBTQ Inclusivity in Schools: A Self-Assessment Tool”

The general self-assessment encourages education leaders to adopt certain mindsets, such as “I cannot assume a student’s gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation,” and urges them to adopt “inclusive” terminology, such as “using individuals’ chosen names/pronouns” and rejecting terms like “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” for “neutral terms” like...