Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops. She was recently invited to speak at Claremont Colleges, in California. Demonstrators shut the event down, and when the college President chastised the protesters, their response was a manifesto justifying their position. Ms. Mac Donald addresses the proclamation in the following article. We-few-we-miserable-few.
If you have never experienced such a document, there are some rules you should keep in mind. The rules will not help you understand the content but will give some insight into the style.
First, the document is written by a committee. There is no single author. A cross section of the outraged makes up the committee. The left has learned that if only one group has a stake in a particular topic and the decide to show and demonstrate, then the demonstration can take place in a telephone booth with room for two more. Such a turnout does not provide the impact they seek. So the left seeks out alliances so that went the time comes they can call on the participation of twenty of thirty different groups to show up and go through the motions.
The grand alliance works fine but for two problems. The only people who know what the protest is about are those in the core group. Most demonstrators just know that they are supposed to be at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk, bring signs and masks. The second problem arises when the call goes out for a statement of grievances, or a call for action. When that happens the resulting document, illustrated in this article reads more like a keyword search than a coherent statement of purpose. Try this on for size, (“Though this institution as well as many others including this entire country, have been founded upon the oppression and degradation of marginalized bodies, it has a liability to protect the students that it serves”); Huh?
The grand alliance demands that the various groups represented all get a say. So those that oppose,” nuking whales,” wearing fur, killing unarmed black men who are armed, support gay marriage, trans rights, and bestiality all gets to add their two cents. So we get: “The idea that there is a single truth—‘the Truth’—is a construct of the Euro-West that is deeply rooted in the Enlightenment . . . This construction is a myth and white supremacy, imperialism, colonization, capitalism, and the United States of America are all of its progeny. The idea that the truth is an entity for which we must search, in matters that endanger our abilities to exist in open spaces, is an attempt to silence oppressed peoples.”
It is easy to laugh at these pretentious buffoons and imagine them as graduates in the real world. The problem with that is there is no guarantee that they will ever enter the real world. The can follow the example of all the pretenders and intellectual idiots that went before them. If they do that, what you see is the next crop of social workers, journalists, teachers and college professors.
About twenty-five years ago I was assisting DEA on a search warrant execution on the West side of San Antonio. They were targeting heroin distribution by the Mexican Mafia. This was before the Mexican Mafia had become a household word. I was plowing through a stack of papers when I came across a fifth generation copy of an illustrated document. Not one with pictures, the type that had a flowery script. I read it and thought what a great bit of satire. The document, full of misspellings, grammatical errors, flawed logic had miles to go before it could be considered semi-literate, purported to be the Constitution of the Mexican Mafia. I laughingly passed it along to the DEA team leader, because I thought it was a joke. The joke was on me, that piece of crap was a copy of the Constitution of the Mexican Mafia. Since that time the Mexican Mafia has become one of the top tier prison gangs in the United States; I guess it worked for them.
History shows that when an opponent offers up a statement of purpose, no matter how poorly written or ill-conceived it may be, laugh if you want to, but recognize it for the threat it represents. These students are not embarking on a childish lark. This is an announcement of long-term plans and goals and a lifetime antipathy to values most Americans embrace.
King George laughed at the Declaration of Independence, look what it got him.