the struggle session is real

and it's time that civility and civilization struggled back

struggle sessions were the hallmark of menacing marxism from mao to stalin. you rounded up the dissidents and the inadequately zealous or whoever happened not to kowtow quickly enough when you sauntered by in your snazzy brutality battalion sash and jammed them into the middle of a crowd amidst the threat of impending violence and forced and shamed them into confessing their errors and their insufficiencies.

it’s a powerful mechanism of control and instils deep fear precisely because it’s peer driven, comes from nowhere, and can grab and affect anyone.

it’s how you get the mob to watch itself by handing out attaboys when it turns on members and ravages them.

it’s crowdsourced thought police.

and it’s shockingly unpleasant to live through.

it’s also shockingly attractive to a certain kind of bully.

but even the most melodramatic of maoists would generally not toss you in the cauldron for a simple apology.

that’s a really special kind of zealot.

all the “counter reactionary” jingo lingo is more than a little reminiscent of the “great leaps forward.”

there’s nothing new here.

it’s as predictable as it is ugly.

but it’s also rank hypocrisy.

can anyone imagine that this mob would accept others behaving toward them as they have just themselves behaved?

because i sure don’t see it and this failure of empathy and shape rotation warrants more than a little concern.

from a crowd that so routinely conflates speech with violence, i’m curious:

how are we to describe this?

what was the purpose of this “speech” if not to intimidate?

it’s bad enough to play the intellectual while shouting down all other viewpoints so that you may avoid ever hearing them spoken true and instead rail against pastiches and straw men of honest opposition in the echo chamber of your choice.

but at least that just makes you stupid and stunted and ignorant.

however, when one seeks to terrorize others for engaging in civility, well, that’s a horse of a different color, isn’t it?

keep in mind: this is literally a protest against an apology.

this was the dean who presided over the wrecking of the speech of an invited speaker.

Fifth Circuit judge Stuart Kyle Duncan: “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.

the tables sure can turn quickly.

truly, religions (secular or deistic) always save their most vicious vitriol not for the unbeliever, but for the apostate. it’s how they keep you whipped into line and locked in the fold.

i have minimal sympathy for ms martinez as a certain amount of comeuppance for a sorcerer’s apprentice who loses control of the spell seems fitting, geese, ganders, goodness, etc. but i do fear for these students and for the institutions they are infecting with this rot.

these are impending lawyers and jurists. and they have been indoctrinated into a cult that is inching toward the part that comes next after struggle sessions: rounding up the reactionaries and putting them against the wall.

and in their towering unselfawareness they are so pig ignorant about this fact that they have become a genuine problem.

it’s always these broken, power hungry kids that comprise the shock troops in such movements. they egg one another on and imagine that they will always be the purger and not the purgee and the frisson of being beastly excites them. apparently, the stanford prison experiment has nothing on stanford law school…

(perhaps some of jenny’s students might learn a valuable lesson about this from her fate… lol. j/k. of course they won’t. they never do.)

this is not the “heckler’s veto,” it’s the crybully’s hypocritical profession of safety culture that they may with impunity menace others.

it’s ideology as a weapon of mob rule.

this is not about emotional security, it’s about emotional assault and exclusion being cast as civic virtue though the endless profession of fragility and the claim of the right to be reprehensibly vile to others while denying them any similar consideration.

“check your privilege. only we get privileges around here.”

video HERE.

this is not about diversity or equity or inclusion.

this is a bunch of colicky babies trying to tantrum their way to dominance.

it’s not ideological purity or some grand movement, it’s just naked desire to wield the whip hand and demanding that others thank you for it.

it’s tyranny of the other side and it is vicious, stunted, and narcissistic.

it’s peter pan peter principle trying desperately not to grow up so that it can keep telling itself that it’s the solution and not the problem.

and its 15 minutes are up.

stanford law review file photo

call this out by name and without fear.

it’s not intimidating or empathetic or wise.

it’s just a bunch of broken, unevolved people enraged into a mob to protect their privilege by pretending to be victims.

it would be sad were it not so pernicious.

but it is pernicious and pernicious to the point where remediation is warranted.

clearly, i’m no dean (and would likely find the job intolerable) but were i such a figure at a school like this, my solution would be simple:

let’s teach.

every student who engaged in the black-clad masked intimidation of a faculty member for the heinous crime of having apologized for acting the boor and the bully with an invited guest should face a choice:

pen a handwritten and heartfelt apology for their uncivilized thuggery that they must stand and read aloud and with sincerity before the whole of their law school or be expelled.

that’s it.

it’s a teachable moment.

either you are the sort of person capable of empathy and regret and apology for having engaged in exactly the sort of behavior you profess to abhor or you’re an irremediable bully and have no place in such august halls and company.

period.

choose.

learn your lesson, rotate the shape, feel what it’s like to be on the other side of what you did, and grow into a better, sounder, more grounded adult or beat feet.

you like struggle sessions?

once this would have been the obvious and instant solution from boarding school to ivy hall. this sort of “goosing the gander” was a hallmark of civilization and the raising of civilized and self-governing adults.

and the fact that it is not so today underlies every problem with the modern academy.

we are teaching the wrong lessons.

we’re not raising moral people.

we’re raising maoist shock troops who have nasty designs on savaging others and playing out bully fantasies.

and allowing them to revel in it “cuz fragile” is going to end poorly for all concerned.

and we can do better.

and we need to.