Perhaps yesterday’s discussion of academic feminism — “The Feminist-Industrial Complex: Academia and the Means of Production” — was one of those “TL:DR” experiences for you. Certainly, when I stretch it out to 3,600 words, with lengthy quotations from Queer Theory scholars, I understand that many readers will skip out after a few paragraphs.

The reader’s irritated impatience (“What’s the point here?”) got an unexpectedly quick answer from the latest headlines:

A students’ union has been accused of racism and sexism after banning white people and men from an event to promote equality.

Those studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, were invited to the students’ union meeting to discuss ‘diversifying the curriculum’.

But they were shocked when an organiser told white people and men ‘not to come’ as it was only open to BME [black and minority ethnic] women.

The union eventually backed down after a backlash from students, one of whom described the exclusive policy as ‘patronising beyond belief’.

The event, held on Wednesday, was organised by welfare and diversity officer Bahar Mustafa, who said she hoped to persuade academics to broaden courses to include more material relating to minority groups.

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.) You see that his happened at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College, where Professor Sara Ahmed is director of the Centre for Feminist Research:

The Centre for Feminist Research (CFR) provides a coordinating hub for feminist work at Goldsmiths. In addition to organising seminars and conferences, the CFR offers a symbolic and intellectual home for the MA in Gender, Media and Culture, co-convened by the Departments of Media & Communications and Sociology. . . .

By ‘feminist research’ we include any work that is informed by an active engagement with feminist intellectual debates, and any research that investigates questions of power, inequality and difference including race, class, disability as well as gender and sexuality. . . .

Gosh, who would have thought this was so timely and relevant?

Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver warned, and Cultural Marxism is an idea whose influence pervades academia. When the primary object of intellectual endeavor is “research that investigates questions of power, inequality and difference,” you can be sure that no one will be permitted to express skepticism and dissent about this unmistakably political agenda. Once doubt and opposition have been excluded, so that only True Believers are permitted to participate in the discussion, the university is no longer engaged in education, but rather indoctrination. The employment of intellectual totalitarians like Sara Ahmed in positions of authority is a signifier — a sort of dye marker — advertising the University of London’s hostility to freedom of thought.

Is anyone therefore surprised to discover that “diversity officer” Bahar Mustafa is a crypto-fascist thug?

ZERO TOLERANCE on homophobia, queer-phobia,

trans*phobia, racism, Islamaphobia, misogyny,

ableism, cis-sexism, and classist behaviour.

Translation: “Disagreement is hate!”

The Feminist-Industrial Complex is based in academia where it is protected by “anti-discrimination” policies that have the effect of prohibiting dissent from feminist ideology. Inside the campus cocoon, particularly within Women’s Studies programs, students and faculty alike never have to encounter articulate disagreement with the fanatical certainty of their belief system:

Whether they are speaking of “male supremacy” or “sexism,” whether the immediate object of their indignation is “rape culture,” “harassment” or the “objectification” of women in media, always the fundamental premise of the feminist argument is this systemic, historical and universal oppression of women. What we might call the Patriarchal Thesis is really an extraordinary assertion, requiring us to believe that there are no natural differences between men and women. Rather, everything we consider to be “natural” in terms of human traits and behavior — the masculinity of males and the femininity of females — is socially constructed by the gender binary of the heterosexual matrix.

This is why, for example, “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” are necessary when Christina Hoff Sommers sets foot on campus:

From her podium in Dye Lecture Hall, Christina Hoff Sommers, an author, former philosophy professor and self-proclaimed “freedom feminist,” attempted, amid protesters and dissenting audience members, to persuade Oberlin students that feminism has become too radicalized. She was invited to campus on Monday night by the Oberlin College Republicans and Libertarians . . .

Before Sommers arrived at Dye Lecture Hall, protesters covered the venue with signs criticizing her beliefs and the event. One sign read “Support Survivors,” referring to survivors of sexualized violence. Another sign read “Rape Culture Hall of Fame” with the names of past and present members of OCRL listed below. . . .

Protesters and other students who opposed the event could not be reached for comment, but they described their opposition in a letter published in the Review last week.

“By bringing her to a college campus laden with trauma and sexualized violence and full of victims/survivors, OCRL is choosing to reinforce this climate of denial/ blame/shame that ultimately has real life consequences on the wellbeing of people who have experienced sexualized violence,” they wrote. “We could spend all of our time and energy explaining all of the ways she’s harmful. But why should we?”

What madness takes hold in the minds of overprivileged young people who expect to convince us that Oberlin College (annual tuition $48,682) is a “campus laden with trauma and sexualized violence”? Do they actually believe this or, as we might instead suspect, has the Feminist-Industrial Complex fostered a climate in which it is forbidden to contradict these deliberate lies? Banishing opposition allows feminism’s anti-male/anti-heterosexual paranoia (“Fear and Loathing of the Penis”) to rage unchecked like a viral pandemic. Nick Mascari at Third Base Politics reported Sommers’ April 20 Oberlin lecture:

At the end, Sommers took questions. All but one were obviously hostile to her presence, and she took questions from an equal number of male and female attendees. A female student behind me exclaimed “Oh look! She called on a boy!” every single time she took a question from a male student, even though every one of the male questions she received was equally as hostile to her as the female questions.

After taking questions from three women in a row, she took the final question from a man. The student behind me again remarked “Oh look another question from a boy!”.

I politely asked her, “But weren’t the last three girls?”

She glared at me and said, “This is an event about FEMINISM!”

After her discussion with the male student was finished, the same student said to me, “It’s offensive that you said to me ‘Should she only call on pretty girls?’”

“That’s not what I said. I asked weren’t the last three questions from girls? You misunderstood, miss.”

She continued to accuse me. I didn’t bother to inform her that I was recording the speech and had our words on tape. It wouldn’t have mattered.

In 2015, “feminism” is a subject about which only women are allowed to speak. Feminism can never permit women to speak favorably of males, and the only thing males can contribute to feminism is silence.

“SHUT UP, BECAUSE RAPE!”

Such is the totalitarian message of feminism, as it has been for more than four decades. “Women’s way of knowing” is rooted in what the 1969 Redstockings Manifesto called women’s “personal experience, and our feelings about that experience,” which feminists insist is the only possible basis for analysis. There are no objective facts beyond women’s subjective feelings about their experiences, and therefore no feminist should listen to anything any man has to say about anything.

Remember: If you disagree with a feminist, your disagreement proves that you are a rape apologist who hates women. #tcot #YesAllWomen — Robert Stacy McCain (@rsmccain) April 26, 2015

Universities now teach feminism as Science with a capital “S” and Truth with a capital “T.” No one can be allowed to deny Scientific Truth, which is whatever women say it is. Women have a monopoly on intelligence, knowledge and virtue because, feminists believe, everything men do is wrong and everything men say is false. (See “‘There Is No Spoon’: Radical Feminism and the Paranoid Matrix of Patriarchy.”)

These are the totalitarian conclusions to which feminism’s hateful logic leads, and nowhere is this more evident than at elite university campuses. Emma Sulkowicz became the most feminist at Columbia University (annual tuition $51,008) by accusing her former friend Paul Nungesser of rape. Once the facts were made public in Nungesser’s federal lawsuit against Columbia, however, it seemed otherwise: Sulkowicz is simply a spiteful liar motivated by a selfish desire for revenge. Nungesser didn’t want to date Sulkowicz, so she evidently plotted to get him expelled from Columbia. When that failed — every investigation cleared Nungesser of wrongdoing — Sulkowicz decided to make herself famous by ruining his reputation.

Sulkowicz spoke at an April 16 “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” event at Brown University, and quotes from her speech reveal her to be a young woman with some very strange ideas about truth:

“There does not exist a scientific way to prove non-consent. . . . When it comes to sexual violence, scientific proof is impossible. . . . If we use proof in rape cases, we fall into the patterns of rape deniers. . . . When a person claims that their theory is a science, they disqualify other types of knowledge. . . . Let’s change the question from ‘Did she consent that night?’ to ‘Did she have the power to consent that night?’ . . . This is not about physical strength. . . . This is about historical power. . . . Seeing is the origin of interpretation. Interpretation is the origin of knowing. . . . If truth is scientific, then art cannot access truth. But perhaps there is something beyond the truth. . . . When people assume I’m bringing the truth to light, they project their own idea of truth onto me. . . . When people engage in believing in me, they objectify me.”

There is no truth, there is only power — this is what feminism teaches. This is how feminism empowers liars. Unless we recover our concern for truth, unless we reject the hateful totalitarian ideology that can justify any lie if the lie serves the cause of “progress,” our society is utterly and irretrievably doomed. Deprived of our freedom to speak truth, we shall be enslaved by liars whose unscrupulous appetite for power is exceeded only by their cruelty and dishonesty.

“Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself . . . she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate, errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them.”

— Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 1786

Be afraid, America. Be very afraid.















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