Brenda Grisham has announced the Recall now is seeking at least 225,000 signatures, in order to guarantee the 73,000 legally required to recall Price. This is up from the 100,000 originally sought, and is because Price is throwing every obstacle she can to stop the Recall. I don’t know if the Alameda County Registrar of Voters is actually allied with Price, but we can’t discount the possibility, nor can we ignore the fact that Price is a vengeful but clever lawyer, with a strong motivation to kill the Recall. She knows how to use the courts, so we have to take very seriously the threat of her derailing our train.
Therefore, I’m reissuing the call for everyone who reads this to please gather signatures! You can get the forms from me.
On another Recall front, many of you have inquired whether middle initials are required when people sign a petition. Here’s the answer from Carl Chan, just as he expressed it to me in an email: “According to the information we got, it is okay not to include the middle initial.”
So there you go! Let’s get those petitions circulating!
THE WOKENESS OF UNIVERSITIES: AN INDICTMENT
Thanks to Coalition member Michael Sosebee for sending me this article, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” by Niall Ferguson, a historian associated with the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Here’s Ferguson’s operative quote: “I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of [university] trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory,’ and apologists for Islamist extremism.”
As I’ve pointed out before, American universities have become hotbeds of wokeism, in what the journalist Christopher Rufo calls wokeism’s “long march through the institutions.” That is an allusion to the so-called “long march” of the Chinese Communists in their successful years-long struggle to rule China. Colleges and universities are among the institutions through which wokeism has marched over the past forty years. As a result, these centers of higher education tend to employ liberal, progressive or “woke” faculty, and this is what Ferguson is critical of, because of the ability of these professors to indoctrinate their impressionable students.
Universities have long tended to be liberal bastions and there’s nothing wrong with that. Better-educated people are more liberal (which is why Republicans frown on education, unless it’s Biblical). Problem is, in this case liberalism has turned “illiberal” with the result that demands for the destruction of the Israeli people are now commonplace in schools from U.C. Berkeley to Harvard. The language of the protesters may not explicitly call for “Death to Israel” (as a common Palestinian chant goes), but when students, egged on by progressive professors, cry out “From the River to the Sea,” there can be no doubt what they mean: All Jews living between the Jordan River in the East and the Mediterranean Sea on the West must be eradicated. Pro-Palestinian propagandists argue that the slogan is merely a metaphor, but they lie and deceive. The taunt of “Death to the Zionist entity” is heard throughout radical Islam; such threats must be taken seriously.
There’s nothing “liberal” about wokeism, which is more akin to fascist regimes we’ve seen, from the authoritarian Islamic regimes of Africa and Asia to Nazi Germany to today’s Hungary and Poland. These are countries where, unless you toe the party line, you could find yourself in hot water. Try living in Afghanistan and leading a Rainbow Pride parade! The U.S.A., however you see it, always has stood for freedom of expression. But the wokes would cancel free expression in our schools and limit it to praise of Marxism and the dreary nomenclature of “equity.” The censorship of rightwing regimes, such as Florida’s book banning, is equally awful, but let’s not pretend the extreme left is somehow morally superior to the extreme right. How else can you explain the fact that, on nextdoor.com, you’re not allowed to say “White Lives Matter,” but “Black Lives Matter” is always welcome. Or how do you explain why the media, including the San Francisco Chronicle, capitalizes the word “Black” but not the word “White”? In researching this, I’ve discovered that it comes from The Associated Press Stylebook, which is adhered to by almost every newspaper in the country but is also widely used on college campuses. They decided that Black needs to be capitalized but white doesn’t.
And where did the AP get this notion? From the highly-respected Columbia Journalism Review, which determined that “Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.”
Well, we should thank the wokes at the Columbia Journalism Review for helping us get that straightened out. I had no idea that all Black people in the world have “a shared sense of identity.” Does that include the Hutus and Tutsis, who have murdered each other by the hundreds of thousands? This definition seems so arbitrary, so ridiculous, that it can only have been prompted by the same warped ideology emanating from the Oakland City Council. At any rate, this idea, like so many other bizarre ones, originated in the ivory towers of university English, literature and race and equity departments, but I really believe the woke movement got over its skis, and is petering out.
Favoring one particular demographic group over all others is dumb, antithetical to democracy, and insulting to the groups that are unfavored. Not that I particularly feel insulted because the Associated Press and Columbia Journalism Review won’t capitalize my race, which is White—I couldn’t care less. But it’s so indicative of where campuses are at: infected by a tiresome, intellectually vapid and indefensible leftwing ideology that, like a noxious fume, has spread across America in—yes—wokeism’s long march through the institutions.
Steve Heimoff