Woke Tales: Anti-Semitism at Yale, Mask Madness at Cornell

Woke Tales, a regular segment on my radio show, very often features stories from college campuses -- which have long been hotbeds of left-wing excess. As this nonsense is exported from academia, and increasingly impacts or even dictates 'real life' elsewhere, paying attention to ivory tower trends is more important than ever. In recent weeks, a firestorm has played out at Yale law school, where a conservative-leaning student was targeted by the mob for an allegedly 'racist' term he used in a party invitation. After immense pushback, it appears as though the cancellers failed in this particular effort, but boy did they certainly try:

Truly psychotic. Every sane professor at @Yale should condemn this. Every alum that donates to @YaleLawSch should give them a call. Amazing work @aaronsibarium: https://t.co/sH8l1GUkra
— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) October 13, 2021

Administrators at Yale Law School spent weeks pressuring a student to apologize for a "triggering" email in which he referred to his apartment as a "trap house," a slang term for a place where people buy drugs. Part of what made the email "triggering," the administrators told the student, was his membership in a conservative organization. The second-year law student, a member of both the Native American Law Students Association and the conservative Federalist Society, had invited classmates to an event cohosted by the two groups. "We will be christening our very own (soon to be) world-renowned NALSA Trap House … by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc," he wrote in a Sept. 15 email to the Native American listserv. In keeping with the theme, he said, the mixer would serve "American-themed snacks" like "Popeye’s chicken" and "apple pie." ... Within minutes, the lighthearted invite had been screenshotted and shared to an online forum for all second-year law students, several of whom alleged that the term "trap house" indicated a blackface party..."I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough," the president of the Black Law Students Association wrote in the forum. "Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face." She also objected to the mixer’s affiliation with the Federalist Society, which she said "has historically supported anti-Black rhetoric."...

Just 12 hours after the email went out, the student was summoned to the law school’s Office of Student Affairs, which administrators said had received nine discrimination and harassment complaints about his message. At a Sept. 16 meeting, which the student recorded and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, associate dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik told the student that the word "trap" connotes crack use, hip hop, and blackface. Those "triggering associations," Eldik said, were "compounded by the fried chicken reference," which "is often used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to racial health disparities in the U.S." Eldik, a former Obama White House official, went on to say that the student’s membership in the Federalist Society had "triggered" his peers. "The email’s association with FedSoc was very triggering for students who already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities," Eldik said. "That of course obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities."

This is all bonkers, and it's a frightening, ludicrous pageant of grievance and victimhood to watch unfold at one of the most prestigious institutions in the country, featuring tomorrow's elite attorneys, no less. As indicated above, thankfully, there was a fierce backlash, and the student (a person of color, in fact!) was spared. To his credit, he also refused to apologize or bend the knee to the jackals. The Washington Free Beacon played a major role in the coverage of this whole episode. As a follow-up, they've now uncovered another incident at Yale Law, again involving the "diversity director:"

The Yale Law School administrator caught on tape pressuring a student to apologize for an allegedly racist party invitation pushed the Yale Law Journal to host a diversity trainer who told students that anti-Semitism is merely a form of anti-blackness and suggested that the FBI artificially inflates the number of anti-Semitic hate crimes. The comments from diversity trainer Ericka Hart—a self-described "kinky" sex-ed teacher who works with children as young as nine—shocked members of the predominantly liberal law review, many of whom characterized the presentation as anti-Semitic, according to a memo from Yale Law Journal editors obtained by the Washington Free Beacon..."I consider myself very liberal," a student quoted in the memo said. But Hart's presentation, delivered Sept. 17 to members of the prestigious law review, was "almost like a conservative parody of what antiracism trainings are like."

The controversy began when a law journal editor asked Hart why her presentation had addressed inequities like "pretty privilege" and "fatphobia" but not anti-Semitism. According to the memo, which collected feedback on the training from 33 law journal editors, Hart responded that she'd already covered anti-Semitism by discussing anti-blackness, because some Jews are black. She also raised questions about FBI data showing that Jews are the most frequent targets of hate crimes—implying, in the words of one journal editor, that the people compiling those statistics had an "agenda." "She basically said anti-Semitism is a subset of anti-blackness," the editor told the Free Beacon. "She didn't recognize there could be anti-Semitism against white people." That characterization is corroborated by two students quoted in the memo, and by a third who spoke on the condition of anonymity...Reactions to the training were almost uniformly negative, with 82 percent of editors saying they would not invite Hart back even if she incorporated their feedback. Over a third expressed distress at her treatment of anti-Semitism—"shocking," "offensive," and "upsetting" is how three separate editors described it—while several more mocked her account of "white supremacy culture," which one editor called "goalpost-moving, unfalsifiable nonsense."

It's a commentary on Yale and elite academia more broadly that bigoted grifters like this are invited to conduct "trainings" on "diversity," "inclusion," "equity," and "anti-racism," along with any other buzzwords I've excluded. It's at least somewhat encouraging that some of the students, including liberal ones, were contemptuous of the incoherent claptrap they were being served. At least high-level law students can think for themselves, it seems; it's harder for younger students to stand up to nonsense being railroaded into their heads by ideologues, which is why so many parents are up in arms over racialized curricula in K-12 education. At Yale, will the "diversity" apparatchik suffer any consequences for bringing an anti-Semite to campus on the same day he pressured and threatened a student to apologize over a preposterous micro-aggression? This blunt observation is more accurate than many people would like to admit:

Where there is wokeism, there is anti-semitism. Always.https://t.co/alzZVtNENw
— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) November 2, 2021

Meanwhile, at Cornell:

Most absurd thing I’ve seen in a long time- professor that i had at @Cornell threatening/failing 2 students for not wearing a mask in a massive classroom (amphitheater), and then on top of that really dances on the border of being offensive with the descriptions of the students pic.twitter.com/HyYTAlsuxs
— Connor Dolan (@connordolan14) November 1, 2021

Just read that whole email and try to tell me that it's the mask-noncompliant students who the problem here. Come for the actual use of the term "prominent hooked nose," and stay for the vow to fail the students for the semester due to their masking practices. Yikes. COVID neuroses and power trips are alive and well in many parts of the country, and especially on college campuses. On a quasi-related note, I'll leave you with this: