Here is a story from the WSJ on a key component of the engine that powers the Snowflake Making Machine. Mind blowing stupidity on full display. Dr. Flynn nailed it, Intellectual Morons.
Lorde of the Flies: Why College Students Reject Reason
Meet the poet who championed subjectivity and what is now called ‘intersectionality.’
Jillian Kay Melchior
Dec. 8, 2017 6:17 p.m. ET
The experience of being an outsider is central to the poetry of Audre Lorde. So it’s curious that Lorde, who died in 1992, has posthumously become the ultimate insider on American campuses, providing an ideological foundation for today’s social-justice warriors.
It’s hard to overstate Lorde’s influence. Each spring, Tulane hosts a “diversity and inclusion” event called Audre Lorde Days. The Ford Foundation’s president, Darren Walker, quoted Lorde in his 2017 commencement address at Oberlin, describing her as “one of my sheroes.” The University of Utah has an Audre Lorde Student Lounge, as well as LORDE Scholars, an acronym for Leaders of Resilience, Diversity and Excellence. The University of Cincinnati hosts an Audre Lorde Lecture Series each semester and is working on the Audre Lorde Social Justice Living-LearningCo mmunity, which will offer “gender inclusive” housing, activities, collective projects and a supplemental curriculum. The university’s LGBTQ Center director even has a tattoo of a Lorde quote on her arm.
Lorde has also popped up in several high-profile campus controversies. The University of Missouri’s student activists cited her as one of their inspirations, along with the Black Liberation Army’s Assata Shakur. Last December, students at the University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of Shakespeare in the English Department, replacing it with a printout photo of Lorde. The swap was “a way of affirming their commitment to a more inclusive mission for the English department,” its chairman, Jed Esty, explained. Organizers of Evergreen State College’s infamous “Day of Absence,” in which white people were urged to stay away from campus, included Lorde quotes in its promotions.
Photo: Joseph Fuqua II/ University of Cincinnati
More fundamentally, higher education is obsessed with “intersectionality.” Lorde didn’t invent the idea, but her adherents believe she embodies it. The theory supposes that different forms of discrimination act together to compound oppression. Lorde, who was black and lesbian, claimed to write from the perspective of “those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older.” She described America as “a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable.”
In this hostile environment, she wrote, “your silence will not protect you.” For the multiply marginalized, she added, “survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Lorde’s campus acolytes see the university as the “master’s house” and Western thought as his tools—which is to say that they espouse an ideology that rejects the idea of a classical education. Lorde claims to offer an alternative. “When we view living in the european [sic] mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious,” Lorde wrote in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” a 1977 essay.
She continued: “But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. . . . The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
In another essay, she asserts, “Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.” She defines the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings.” If student activists seem irrational, they’re actually deliberately antirational, rejecting reason as “white” and “male.”
And if they seem self-absorbed, that is consistent with Lorde’s encouragement to turn inward. “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within,” she wrote. Lorde also claimed that in an oppressive society, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Ergo, when students enjoy crayons and cookies in their designated safe spaces, it is a revolutionary act.
Moreover, Lorde claims that “in order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized”—and, if her comments in a 1979 interview are any indication, accepted unquestioningly. Lorde recounts how her interlocutor, the white feminist poetess Adrienne Rich, had once told her during a conversation, “It’s not enough to say to me that you intuit it.” Lorde insists: “Even at the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt a total wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating. . . . I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering.” Skepticism or demands for evidence are not only a personal affront but an example of the oppressive system at work.
Earlier this year, this newspaper examined test scores and discovered that at more than 100 American colleges, at least one-third of seniors were incapable of making an argument or weighing evidence, among other tasks of critical thinking. Lorde’s influence would seem to match her popularity.
Ms. Melchior is an editorial page writer at the Journal.
Lorde of the Flies: Why College Students Reject Reason
Meet the poet who championed subjectivity and what is now called ‘intersectionality.’
Jillian Kay Melchior
Dec. 8, 2017 6:17 p.m. ET
The experience of being an outsider is central to the poetry of Audre Lorde. So it’s curious that Lorde, who died in 1992, has posthumously become the ultimate insider on American campuses, providing an ideological foundation for today’s social-justice warriors.
It’s hard to overstate Lorde’s influence. Each spring, Tulane hosts a “diversity and inclusion” event called Audre Lorde Days. The Ford Foundation’s president, Darren Walker, quoted Lorde in his 2017 commencement address at Oberlin, describing her as “one of my sheroes.” The University of Utah has an Audre Lorde Student Lounge, as well as LORDE Scholars, an acronym for Leaders of Resilience, Diversity and Excellence. The University of Cincinnati hosts an Audre Lorde Lecture Series each semester and is working on the Audre Lorde Social Justice Living-LearningCo mmunity, which will offer “gender inclusive” housing, activities, collective projects and a supplemental curriculum. The university’s LGBTQ Center director even has a tattoo of a Lorde quote on her arm.
Lorde has also popped up in several high-profile campus controversies. The University of Missouri’s student activists cited her as one of their inspirations, along with the Black Liberation Army’s Assata Shakur. Last December, students at the University of Pennsylvania took down a portrait of Shakespeare in the English Department, replacing it with a printout photo of Lorde. The swap was “a way of affirming their commitment to a more inclusive mission for the English department,” its chairman, Jed Esty, explained. Organizers of Evergreen State College’s infamous “Day of Absence,” in which white people were urged to stay away from campus, included Lorde quotes in its promotions.
Photo: Joseph Fuqua II/ University of Cincinnati
More fundamentally, higher education is obsessed with “intersectionality.” Lorde didn’t invent the idea, but her adherents believe she embodies it. The theory supposes that different forms of discrimination act together to compound oppression. Lorde, who was black and lesbian, claimed to write from the perspective of “those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older.” She described America as “a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable.”
In this hostile environment, she wrote, “your silence will not protect you.” For the multiply marginalized, she added, “survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
Lorde’s campus acolytes see the university as the “master’s house” and Western thought as his tools—which is to say that they espouse an ideology that rejects the idea of a classical education. Lorde claims to offer an alternative. “When we view living in the european [sic] mode only as a problem to be solved, we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious,” Lorde wrote in “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” a 1977 essay.
She continued: “But as we come more into touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living as a situation to be experienced and interacted with, we learn more and more to cherish our feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes. . . . The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”
In another essay, she asserts, “Beyond the superficial, the considered phrase, ‘It feels right to me,’ acknowledges the strength of the erotic into a true knowledge, for what that means is the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding.” She defines the erotic as “a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feelings.” If student activists seem irrational, they’re actually deliberately antirational, rejecting reason as “white” and “male.”
And if they seem self-absorbed, that is consistent with Lorde’s encouragement to turn inward. “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within,” she wrote. Lorde also claimed that in an oppressive society, “caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Ergo, when students enjoy crayons and cookies in their designated safe spaces, it is a revolutionary act.
Moreover, Lorde claims that “in order to be utilized, our erotic feelings must be recognized”—and, if her comments in a 1979 interview are any indication, accepted unquestioningly. Lorde recounts how her interlocutor, the white feminist poetess Adrienne Rich, had once told her during a conversation, “It’s not enough to say to me that you intuit it.” Lorde insists: “Even at the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt a total wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating. . . . I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the process of discovering.” Skepticism or demands for evidence are not only a personal affront but an example of the oppressive system at work.
Earlier this year, this newspaper examined test scores and discovered that at more than 100 American colleges, at least one-third of seniors were incapable of making an argument or weighing evidence, among other tasks of critical thinking. Lorde’s influence would seem to match her popularity.
Ms. Melchior is an editorial page writer at the Journal.
