The radicals have taken over: Academic extremism comes to Canada

I bet the poor guy never saw it coming.

Until recently, Henry Parada was director of the School of Social Work at Ryerson University, Toronto’s big downtown commuter school. His career was going well and he got major research grants. Now he has stepped aside after a handful of students calling themselves the Black Liberation Collective accused him of “a violent act of anti-Blackness, misogyny and misogynoir.” What was this act? It seems that he left a meeting where a black female speaker was giving a talk. No one knows why.

What happened next won’t surprise anyone who has been tracking the steady rise of authoritarian illiberalism on the left. The Black Liberation Collective at Ryerson (which has perhaps the most diverse student body in the nation) issued an escalating series of rants demanding immediate action to address his crimes, along with institutional racism in general. Students disrupted faculty meetings. The administration has issued the standard non-response: Basically it values diversity and inclusion, and is looking into the matter.

But really, it doesn’t matter what Prof. Parada did. He’s a white man, and therefore guilty.

Here’s a partial list of what’s been happening on campus lately. At the University of Toronto, psychology professor Jordan Peterson is under attack – not least by his own administration – for refusing to use invented pronouns for transgender people. (Last year, Kenneth Zucker, a renowned U of T psychiatry professor, was fired from his position at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health because his treatment of transgender kids was deemed not radical enough.)

At Queen’s, a good-natured off-campus costume party blew up into a crisis over racism. Queen’s principal Daniel Woolf denounced the event on his blogas “the unacceptable misappropriation and stereotyping of numerous cultures,” and solemnly vowed yet again to improve diversity and inclusion on campus. In other news from Queen’s, the head of a student theatre group was forced to grovel after announcing a plan to cast a white female as the lead in Othello. “There is absolutely no excuse for making a casting decision that was oppressive and caused people of colour to feel as though they were invalid,” she apologized. The production was cancelled.

At many campuses, students routinely try to shut down controversial speakers because they might make someone feel queasy. When Marie Henein, Jian Ghomeshi’s defence lawyer, was invited to speak at Bishop’s University early next year and have her lecture live-streamed to other schools, one women’s studies major at St. Francis Xavier said that Ms. Henein’s talk was a “disservice to students who are victims of sexual violence.” To his credit, Bishop’s principal Michael Goldbloom wrote a rebuttal – an unusual act of academic courage these days.

How did we get here? Here’s a very short answer.

University campuses have always leaned a little left. But in the 1990s, as the previous generation of academics was replaced by baby boomers, they began to lean dramatically left. The humanities and social sciences were colonized by an unholy alliance of poststructuralists and Marxists – people who believe that Western civilization is a corrupt patriarchy that must be dismantled.

According to studies of U.S. universities, 18 per cent of social-sciences professors say they’re Marxists. Only 7 to 9 per cent identify as conservative. Leftism in the academy is a positive feedback loop – and we’re now well past the point where the radicals have taken over. Those who don’t agree just shut up. “There’s no question there’s an atmosphere of terror,” one (older, white, male) professor told me.

According to classic Marxist ideology, people’s degree of oppression is determined by their ancestry and class. Today’s identity politics simply swaps in race and gender. But the anti-liberal thinking is the same. When your goal is revolution, dissent becomes intolerable, and you have a moral licence to shut down free speech. As the very liberal Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine: “Liberalism believes in political rights for everybody, regardless of the content of their ideas. Marxists believe political rights belong only to those arguing on behalf of the oppressed.”

Social sciences and humanities make up only part of universities, of course. Other disciplines – engineering, physics, B-schools – are relatively apolitical. So how is it that the radicals wound up running the show? Here’s Jordan Peterson’s answer: “Engineers and scientists are interested in things. They say, you guys are all insane, just leave us the hell alone.” And by the time they look up, the power positions have been taken over by the radicals.

Not so long ago, I thought this craziness would pass. Now I’m not so sure. When institutions cave in to radicals, their demands will only escalate. As for Prof. Parada, his is a cautionary tale. He believed in the revolution. And it devoured him.

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White Students Union Flyers Ripped Down at Three Toronto Universities

White Student Union Flyers Incite a Legitimation Crisis in Canada

by Obimbola Chibuzo

White Students Union
                    Flyer on Toronto university campuses
Flyer calling for a White Students’ Union, posted on three Toronto campuses

A major legitimation crisis hit three Canadian universities last week when a few flyers calling for a White Students’ Union were posted by a group called Students for Western Civilization. “We do not condone this. We find it offensive,” said Ryerson administrator Michael Forbes. “We need safe spaces on university campuses” against this act of aggression by Whites, said a member of Ryerson’s “Racialized Students’ Collective”. The York University Federation of Students even said the flyers were “violent” and have made students “feel unsafe, harassed, and unwelcome”.

Anti-White Hysteria and Double Standards


Can you believe this? We are speaking about three university campuses in Toronto (Ryerson University, York University, and University of Toronto) all of which are one-hundred percent dedicated to the promotion of diversity and all of which have multiple unions for non-Whites along racial lines. At Ryerson alone we find the following race-oriented unions:

  1. African Students’ Association
  2. United Black Students Ryerson
  3. Caribbean Students’ Association
  4. Afghan Students’ Association
  5. East African Students’ Association
  6. Indian Students’ Association
  7. Chinese Students’ Association
  8. Indigenous Students Association
  9. Organization of Latin American Students
  10. South Asian Alliance
  11. Sri Lankan Student Alliance

The following image welcomes students interested in finding information about these unions:

Ryerson Students' Union
Welcome image of Ryerson Students’ Union, a place for everybody on the campus — except the people who founded this university and the entire nation-state of Canada.


Ryerson, York, University of Toronto were all created by Whites; in fact, universities are a singularly Western invention (see addendum for acollection of expert sources), and all the disciplines taught at them, physics, chemistry, history, anthropology, biology, sociology, philosophy etc. — are fields of research invented by Whites.

Ethnic unions exist at every university in Canada, and while it is true that there are a few unions for particular European ethnic groups, Portuguese and Italian, these unions tend to be folksy-oriented, whereas the ethnic unions for non-Whites are heavily infused with ethnic affirmation, proud signs about their traditions and history, and not a word about how they killed natives in their homelands or how much they love the cultures of others. But more importantly, there are many student unions formed strictly along racial lines, “Black”, “Asian”, “Aboriginal” and even “Jewish”. There is not a single union for Whites or Europeans generally. And these racially-oriented unions by non-Whites are very outspoken in their racial affirmation: check the blatantly anti-White club called “United Black Students at Ryerson”.

Reverse racism is l’ordre du jour at campuses in Toronto and Canada. Every ethnic group is allowed to organize along racial lines but not Eurocanadian students. How can leftists claim that this does not constitute a blatant
double standard?


So why the insane hysteria against three flyers advertising a White student union? I can only think of one reason: the entire pro-diversity structure in Canada (and the West at large) is premised on the expectation that the Whites, the pioneers and nation builders of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America, must relinquish their nations to diversity. But why not allow Whites to celebrate their racial identity in the same way as Asians, Aboriginals, and Blacks? Are they fearful that the moment Whites self-identify as a race, or as ethnic groups with a common European identity, the entire system of lies about how we are all immigrants and how Canada has always been diverse, will be exposed?

Are they fearful that once Whites get together as Whites, they will start reasoning about how they created Canada, how non-Whites are exploiting the anti-White sentiment imposed by our traitorous elites, how non-Whites are using White ideas about humanity and universal right to advance their own particular ethnic interests?

Desmond Cole’s Reverse Racist Column in the Toronto Star

Desmond Cole, as of Sept 17,
will have a weekly column to address “subtle racism”


As if this were not enough, the Black journalist Desmond Cole, who has made a career solely from writing about how Whites keep Blacks down and in prisons, is now insisting, in yet another article about the flyers (see below a list of press articles, excluding multiple ones in Chinese) that Whites who claim there is a bias against them must be designated as “White supremacist” (see here for leftspeak decoding), and dealt with at the “root”.

Our unacknowledged assumptions, and our language about human diversity are better indicators of racism and discrimination than the impolite outbursts we seem so prone to recognizing. The clumsy expressions of hatred on local university campuses this week are like weeds — we can tear out the unsightly offshoots that pop up, but ultimately we have to address the problem at its root.

Imagine; at the bottom of this article, which is dated September 17, it is stated that Cole’s column, “as of today, will appear every Thursdayon the Toronto Star.” The Star, apparently, has agreed to give Cole a weekly column in response to the legitimation crisis brought by the posting of three flyers. The Toronto Star, be it noted, is the major circulation newspaper in Canada.

It may be that Cole already thinks that Canada is some African barbaric state where dissenters are regularly muzzled. But we need to expose these claims for what they are asking: total submission of Whites to non-Whites pursuing their own racial interests; total silencing of Whites who talk about Western civilization and its achievements. Cole likely has no clue about the immense intellectual greatness of the West; instead he says that any White who is interested in learning about this civilization and feels any pride in its achievements is a White supremacist who must be rooted out from Canada. Even those who “sympathize” with the idea that the teaching of Western civilization is valuable should be rooted out as racist. He writes

it is important to challenge and oppose Duchesne, Students for Western Civilization, and their sympathizers. But we must also recognize them as merely the leading edge of a racist undercurrent in Canada, a mainstream fear that insists White people are under attack, but skilfully avoids examining what Whiteness is or where it originated (emphasis mine).

Cole’s previous writings consisted of sporadic articles accusing those who spoke about “Black-on-Black violence” as racist; never mind “Black-on-White violence”, which is not even a conversation anywhere in Canada. But now, apparently, he will be in charge, in his regular Thursdaycolumns, of hunting down, destroying careers, ostracising, and designating as “White supremacist” Canadians who even sympathize with White unions or believe that the teaching of Western Civilization is important. The Toronto Star believes that students will learn more from reading his columns than reading about Western Civilization.

“Racialized Minorities”


Notice how Cole and all the critics of White unions regularly use the term “racialized groups” to designate non-Whites. This is a new Orwellian term the left has now implanted in social science textbooks intended to allow cultural Marxists to say, on the one hand, that race is a social construct and, on the other, that non-Whites have a right to group themselves along racial lines. Whites are not only a construct and do not exist, but should not be allowed to form unions, for doing so is a continuation of their “racialization” of non-Whites. Whites invented races when they colonized the world, and having invented races and racism, non-Whites were “racialized”, and in order for non-Whites to overcome their racialization, they need to form racial unions. As the York Federation of Students has said, “the term Western civilization is nothing more than colonialism”.

This is now the standard curricular line of reasoning in all Canadians universities: Whites who create unions are trying to racialized non-Whites; non-Whites who create unions are fighting White racialization. And since White racialization is “systematically present” in all European nations, non-Whites must be allowed to form unions.

This reasoning is pure sophistry as can be easily revealed once we realize that

  1. Europeans appear to have been the only colonizers because they were the most sophisticated at colonizing, inventing the best navigational techniques and weaponry;
  2. Europeans were the ones responsible for the abolition of slavery upon otherwise recalcitrant Africans and Moslems who love to enslave their own people and anyone different;
  3. the current generation of Whites has nothing to do with racializing non-Whites;
  4. non-Whites crave to come to European lands because they are superior and less racist than their own places of birth;
  5. non-Whites are simply exhibiting a naturally human preference for their own ethnicity when they form ethnic groups;
  6. while hypocritically borrowing cultural Marxist ideas which prohibit Whites, and only Whites, from forming racial groups.

 

Students For Western Civilisation Website
Students For Western Civilization proposing the formation of a White students’ union at York University on their home page


Once Whites are educated properly to see through the fog of ignorance and anti-White teaching at our universities, they will see that forming White or Eurocanadian unions, groups and associations, even political parties, is consistent with the principles of liberalism, free association and freedom of speech. It is also consistent with our natural disposition to prefer our own ethnic groups and race.