Why was Betsy DeVos awarded an honorary degree from an HBCU in the first place?

DeVos was awarded an honorary doctorate by Bethune-Cookman University, a historically black college. The students were not happy.

Graduating students booed Education Secretary Betsy DeVos as she spoke here Wednesday at Bethune-Cookman University’s commencement, and many turned their backs to protest her appearance at the historically black school.

There are lots of reasons to despise DeVos. I would have turned my back on her if she’d appeared at our commencement. She’s an ignorant billionaire who inherited a fortune made with multi-level marketing scams, and she is not at all competent to head an educational organization. Her agenda is to advance her privileges, by wrecking the educational system for others with promotions of vouchers and “school choice”, diluting general education for all by maintaining a hierarchy of schools with varying degrees of institutional support. That’s what had the students riled. She made a few ignorant comments about HBCUs.

“HBCUs are real pioneers when it comes to school choice,” DeVos said in the statement, released Monday night in advance of Trump’s planned signing of an executive order giving the schools more clout. “They are living proof that when more options are provided to students, they are afforded greater access and greater quality. Their success has shown that more options help students flourish.”

No. HBCUs were the product of segregation and discrimination. They were formed because black people were excluded from predominantly white institutions of higher education. It wasn’t a matter of choice at all, but necessity due to racism. Now they’ve cultivated pride and a sense of place and aren’t going away. But don’t pretend the impetus to build them was choice; you might as well pretend African-Americans got here because their ancestors chose to take a cruise.

There was a lot of anger in that room.

Her speech was the typical pious crap we get from the people with power addressing the little people.

The natural instinct is to join in the chorus of conflict, to make your voice louder, your point bigger and your position stronger. But we will not solve the significant and real problems our country faces if we cannot bring ourselves to embrace a mind-set of grace. We must first listen, then speak — with humility — to genuinely hear the perspectives of those with whom we don’t immediately or instinctively agree

Don’t make noise. Be nice. Be humble. LISTEN TO ME, THE RICH WHITE LADY. I can make your lives even worse.

Sometimes, the people given power over an HBCU (or any university, for that matter) are more attuned to the desires of the wealthy donor class than to the needs of the community they serve. The president of Bethune-Cookman, Edison Jackson, mirrors exactly what DeVos said.

Jackson wrote in a letter to the campus community that a willingness to engage with varying viewpoints is a hallmark of higher education. “I am of the belief that it does not benefit our students to suppress voices that we disagree with or to limit students to only those perspectives that are broadly sanctioned by a specific community,” he wrote. “If our students are robbed of the opportunity to experience and interact with views that may be different from their own, then they will be tremendously less equipped for the demands of democratic citizenship.”

That’s patronizing and insulting. I suspect those students, who are graduates of 4 years of good education already, are entirely familiar with the condescending apologetics of the rich, and don’t need to hear one more white billionaire explain to them how to be better servants to a system that enriches the haves and keeps the have-nots quiet, respectful, and accommodating.

Policy and romance? How can I not support her?

This was charming enough.

But even better…Elizabeth Warren actually called her, and talked about a plan!

The best kinds of plan always involve raising taxes on billionaires.

I’m getting a little worried. My wife is still fiercely favoring Bernie Sanders, while I keep on warming to Elizabeth Warren. I may have to worry about my marriage if this continues.

Nah, no worries. The DNC will stack the deck for that schlemiel Biden, and we’ll find marital harmony in hating him together while we both end up voting for him. Then, of course, we’ll be comrades in the revolution that follows.

There are more spider videos where this one comes from, I guarantee it

I have noticed that my spider videos get about a fifth of the traffic of my other videos, which means I must make more, many more, in order to train my audience. You don’t think people just naturally gravitated to cat videos, do you? It took years of exposure to overcome ailurophobia and accustom people to seeing lithe hairy predators (note: description applies to both spiders and cats) on their computer screens. So you just need more. You WILL watch the spiders. You WILL learn to love them.

This is Iðunn, my first specimen of Parasteatoda tepidariorum caught in the spring of 2019. I discovered that she had molted either last night or this morning, so here she is with her leftover cuticle.

WATCH IT. WATCH IT NOOOOOOOOWWWWWW.

Now my beauties. Something with poison in it I think. With poison in it!

I’ve spent all winter doing the book-learnin’. I’ve got so much unfocused spider lore stuffed into my head that I expect it to hatch and little spiderlings to start creeping out of my nostrils. I really need to start applying this information and working with real animals, so every day I prowl around looking for eight-legged beasties to study, and every day I shake my fist at the weather which hasn’t gotten around to any sustained warmth yet. It’s getting a little frustrating. I also have a group of students I’d like to deploy, but it’s all empty cobwebs right now.

They’re out there, I know it. I see an occasional salticid or pholcid indoors, I’m starting to see flies and other prey buzzing around, I’m expecting an explosion of spiders any day now.

The arsenal of democracy and justice

While it does commit the sin of failing to label an axis, it’s still a good point.

I had to look it up, but it seems the cost of an incredibly effective weapon against white nationalists is only about $2.25. A bargain! I am disappointed by one thing, though.

McDonald’s also has strawberry and chocolate shakes, but everyone seems to have an unconscious bias favoring vanilla. Please, can we overcome white bias? Other places must sell shakes in other flavors, like blueberry and mint. I’d like to see a concerted effort to paint fascists all the colors of the rainbow.

Blinded by the Right

Guilty confession time: I once really respected Glenn Greenwald. I thought he was doing admirable work defending civil liberties, although as I saw more and more of the Libertarian Greenwald, it was getting kind of ugly there. I can salve my conscience a little bit, though, in that David Neiwert also liked some of his work. One can be easily misled if you try to interpret him charitably.

So I was surprised in a good way by much of what I began reading at Greenwald’s blog, Unclaimed Territory, in fall of 2005. It was smart, thoughtful, and quite insightful about what he rightly saw as an executive power grab in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy. I began citing it favorably at my own blog, Orcinus, which at that point was also pretty well established (I opened shop there in January 2003).

Hey, me too! Greenwald made a few positive comments about my work, and also follows me on Twitter (although probably not for long). There’s a lot to like about him. There are also lots of hints in his past that there is much to dislike as well. Now Neiwert has compiled a long and thoroughly documented and factual summary of how Greenwald’s libertarian zealotry does harm. Neiwert has all the receipts, and he lays them out, starting with a history of the emerging racist hate groups in the 1950s, through Greenwald’s rise to prominence as one of their most righteous defenders.

I just believe his sort of principled rigidity on free-speech issues blinds him to the real-world effects of fascism—particularly how it manipulates free-speech principles in order to destroy them. Fascists use people like Greenwald to leave a trail of wreckage.

It’s not about whether or not he’s racist—which, after all, would indeed make the whole issue one of guilt by association. That’s not the point of all this. No, this is a question of judgment: If you’re so short-sighted that you can’t see how your ethical choices wind up enabling harmful behavior, then exactly how astute is your judgment in any event?

It’s not guilt by association, it’s the guilt of association: People in responsible mainstream positions who lend legitimacy to people from far-right hate groups—whether Klansmen, skinheads, neo-Nazis, or militiamen—are exercising profoundly poor judgment. Lending them that legitimacy not only normalizes them, it empowers them. It helps fuel the twisted psychology of the far right that inevitably, like a law of physics itself, produces violent horrors and ruptured communities. Ask the folks in Billings, or in Illinois.

It’s an excellent history lesson, but also a solid argument against the multitudes of alt-righters who even now claim they are honest defenders of free speech rights…yet somehow, they always end up aiding the most deplorable, awful people, while overlooking the good people who could use some free speech too, as they get trampled by the rising fascist tide.

Where is Greenwald now? Sadly, he’s doing just that, rushing to the side of Tucker Carlson to claim the white nationalist threat is non-existent, and helping to silence those who oppose it.

More recently, of course, he has appeared frequently on Fox News with Tucker Carlson. Carlson’s record of promoting white-nationalist causes and ideas clearly doesn’t bother Greenwald. In the process, of course, he has become exactly what he once derided caustically: a “Fox News liberal,” one whose appearance on the network is mainly used to help forward right-wing talking points and destroy the left. He’s now a Useful Tool.

And now he is defending his fellow faux progressives as they join Carlson in his campaign to minimize and defend fascist white nationalism as Not Really A Problem.

David Neiwert has earned a lot of trust as a journalist for his careful journalism. Greenwald, sadly, has betrayed it.

Sam Harris shoves his foot down his gullet again

Remember, Sam Harris is the atheist leader who once, when asked where all the women were at in atheism, explained it away by saying atheism lacked that “estrogen vibe” instead of noting all the women who have been leaders and who were currently hard-working activists.

I think it may have to do with my person slant as an author, being very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people..People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women. The atheist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.

He has a great big blind spot for anyone who isn’t a rich white man. So when he says bullshit like this:

A paradox for our time: The far Left is disproportionately white, wealthy, and well-educated. So extreme “wokeness” is now one of the most glaring symptoms of “white privilege.”

He’s just doing it again. It’s because all the black men and women, and Hispanic men and women, and LGBT people who have been fighting for the Left all this time are invisible to him. That far Left is awesomely diverse, while his “Intellectual Dark Web” and the alt-right are a mess of mediocre white people suckling at the teats of conservative think tanks and promoting the status quo that maintains their privilege.

But this is typical of the tin-eared pronouncements from Harris, probably the most clueless of the “Four Horsemen”, and the one who is still regarded as the premier figurehead of alt-atheism. If only this was a position he could be fired from, but he’s still propped up by a horde of white male cultists.