Saturday, June 13, 2020

Neo-Marxist academics have spent decades radicalising their students. They must be reined in.

Julia Hartley-Brewer conducted a fascinating and revealing interview with Dr Kojo Koram earlier this week. A lecturer in race and empire at Birkbeck College, the University of London, Dr Koram could hardly contain his enthusiasm for the violent removal and illegal submersion of Edward Colston's statue in Bristol. He pointedly refused to condemn the violence and, at one particularly surreal moment, even claimed that vandalising the statue - a statue that no doubt served as a comforting mainstay for over a hundred years, bearing witness to the trials and tribulations of successive generations of Bristol's proud inhabitants - was both educational and supported by the majority of the British public. It was astonishing. A learned academic not only condoning but celebrating mob rule.

You could be forgiven for being taken unawares by the events of the last week or so. Statues have been toppled, monuments desecrated and national heroes publicly humiliated. It's indeed been a disorientating time for us all. Why do so many youngsters appear to despise our country? Why are so many immune to reason and seemingly possessed by a visceral, uncontrollable fervour that manifests itself in blood-lust and violence? As I said, it's incredibly disorientating. And when you add the complicity of our educated elites and previously respected institutions into the mix - either through actively encouraging and cheering on the rioters or cowardly turning a blind eye - you get a perfect storm of bewilderment, confusion and, as an inevitable consequence, anger and frustration.

That's why Dr Koram's revelation was so helpful. He represents the source of our current unrest, the womb in which these destructive cultural forces gestated.

Broadly speaking and simply put, our universities are to blame. They are the madrassas responsible for this recent assault upon our cultural heritage. Indeed, over the course of the last several decades, they've become hotbeds of neo-Marxist thought disseminated and promoted by radical left-wing scholars like Dr Koram. 

Heirs to a heady mix of Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs and a long line of anarcho-socialist thinkers, they wish to overturn the hegemonic cultural conservatism that, in their eyes, oppresses the less fortunate, whether represented by working class, BAME, gay or transgender groups. For these scholars, Scientific Marxism is inadequate to the task: oppression is not only experienced through economics; it's also experienced through culture and religion. That's why our statues, monuments, art, even television programmes are under attack. They are seen as instruments of oppression.

And if you believe I'm being alarmist and reductive, that Dr Koram is one man, unrepresentative of the university sector as a whole, consider this: a 2017 survey conducted by the Adam Smith Institute found that eight in ten university lecturers were left-wing. According to the report, 'Conservative and Right-wing academics are particularly scarce in the social sciences, the humanities and the arts', and, as a consequence, universities are 'afflicted by group think and a dysfunctional atmosphere where key assumptions go unquestioned, dissenting opinions are neutralized, and favoured beliefs are held as sacrosanct'. 

In addition, signalling their underlying desire to subsume and suffocate our cultural particularism as embodied in the nation state - which, let's not forget, they view as oppressive -, nine out of 10 university staff backed Remain during the EU Referendum. And this phenomenon isn't just the preserve of the UK, either. A 2016 study conducted in the US found that left-wing university professors outnumbered their conservative colleagues by 12 to 1. It couldn't be clearer. The Left has a stranglehold on the dissemination of ideas throughout our great educational institutions. Furthermore, it has progressively increased this stranglehold over the last five or six decades.

Think, for one moment, what this means. Yes, academics are brainwashing impressionable young kids who - armed with a bit of knowledge and the passion, naivety and arrogance of youth - are deployed as shock troops, violently railing against perceived, largely mythical inequalities, and practically applying the trite, unoriginal anarcho-Marxist theories of their tutors.

But they have also indoctrinated the politicians, Silicon Valley hipsters who patrol and police the Web, right-on journalists and broadcasters: all those university-educated elites who provide the rioters with covering fire and control the narrative. They, too, are sympathetic to the protesters' demands, for the simple reason that they've been inculcated with the same worldview that sees oppressor and oppressed in just about everything.

Okay, you might say, but many of the protesters aren't university educated neo-Marxists. And you'd be right. But they've been exploited by groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter. These are the groups orchestrating the incipient cultural revolution taking place. And they are very much led by university educated neophytes. Just take Black Lives Matter as an example. This radical, extremist group which calls for nothing less that the abolition of the police, the nuclear family and, among other things, the destruction of capitalism, was set up by Alicia Garza, a devout Marxist and sociology graduate from the University of California, San Diego. Her comrades in arms, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi are, again, like Garza, left-wing graduates. 

Antifa, moreover, hardly needs to be introduced. It's full of middle-class, highly educated, privileged radicals demanding revolution. Make no mistake, these groups are conducting the purge, and they're led by graduates brainwashed by leftist professors.

Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, they're being tacitly, sometimes explicitly, supported by our cultural and political elites - elites imbued with the same worldview as the iconoclasts. Even our Police Force appears to be sympathetic to the cause.

It's quite incredible when you think about it. Those who extol the virtues of a university education the most - its recipients -, are the first to forget an important aphorism: a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. And by giving their students a half-baked, highly ideological, one-sided educational experience, our universities are failing in their duty to provide a well-rounded, objective view of the world, a failure that's leading to grotesque displays of intolerance.

Dr Koram did us a huge favour this week. He inadvertently exposed the insidious source of the cultural vandalism we've borne witness to over the last week or so. Neo-Marxist academics have spent decades radicalising their students - students that are now both our elites, and our cultural vandals. They must be reined in. 

Friday, June 5, 2020

George Floyd's murder was not the result of institutionalised racism.

George Floyd's death was shocking. To witness David Chauvin, a man ostensibly employed to enforce the law and uphold the highest standards of conduct so publicly and brazenly do the opposite, choking a defenceless citizen whilst he begged for his life and, most disturbing of all, pleaded for some final gesture of maternal love and comfort during his dying moments, was indeed a profoundly grotesque and provocative experience. I felt both sickened and angry. 

The protests that followed were therefore understandable. America certainly seems to have a problem when it comes to police brutality. There were over a thousand victims of police shootings in 2019 alone. But the protesters - and later the rioters (criminals with whom I have little sympathy) - are not protesting against police brutality per se; they're protesting against what they perceive to be institutional racism within the US-wide police force - racism that, according to them, leads to African-Americans being disproportionately targeted and murdered. That's why the protest movement Black Lives Matter has played such a significant part in the demonstrations.

But are African-Americans disproportionately the victims of police brutality and, if so, is such disproportionality the result of endemic, institutionalised racism? Many seem to think so. From politicians to media luminaries, celebrities to ex-president Barack Obama himself: all subscribe to the pervasive and, in their eyes, incontestable view that racism is incubated within and secreted from the very institutions responsible for dispassionately and equitably upholding the law and with it, the constitutional rights of every American citizen, regardless of race. According to this perspective, that's why blacks are more likely to be shot and killed by the police. Obama even linked George Floyd's murder to 'slavery, Jim Crow, redlining and institutional racism'. He hastily concluded that Floyd's murderer was indeed motivated by racial hatred tolerated and encouraged by an institution that remains bedevilled by the legacy of Jim Crow.

But these charges don't stand up to scrutiny. First, we don't know what motivated the officer responsible for Floyd's death. It is therefore presumptuous and, I must say, knowing the possible repercussions of making such inflammatory claims, irresponsible and reckless to ascribe motive when it's far from clear what prompted the offender. Trump's not the only one stoking the fire here.

Secondly, let's not forget that whites are the victims of half of police shootings. Okay, they'll say, but blacks only represent 13 per cent of the population, therefore, proportionately, they’re more likely to get shot. But blacks are responsible for over 50 per cent of the nation’s homicides; they account for 40 per cent of the prison population; in short, they are more likely to commit violent crime. Bearing this in mind, they’re also more likely to find themselves confronted by an armed police officer, increasing the likelihood of getting shot and killed. Any sane, reasoned glance over the statistics reveals the charge of endemic racism unsustainable. That is not to say that racism doesn’t exist within the police force; nor that racism wasn’t the primary motivation for the murder of George Floyd - though, as I said, that hasn’t been proven yet. But these protests are motivated by spurious claims of endemic, institutionalised racial hatred. They’ve even led to nauseating mea culpas by white, privileged virtue-signallers. They must be challenged with the facts.

This will be no easy task. University educated opinion-formers, virtue-signalling celebrities, corporate CEOs and politically correct politicians - brainwashed by an anti-Western, self-loathing, anti-white and anti-democratic educational establishment and encouraged by an elite culture that values the public display of moral superiority above all else - are almost irredeemably invested in this lie. Antifa activists are their shock troops; members of Black Lives Matter their useful idiots. It really is incredibly disturbing to watch educated people gleefully report the looting of shops and destruction of businesses, especially when they belong to the very people they purport to champion.


It is also incredibly disturbing to watch people in this country who, just over a week ago, hysterically called for the head of one man accused of breaking the Government's lockdown rules, refuse to even question let alone condemn the Antifa-inspired protests gripping London - protests that clearly and flagrantly breach the Government's rules as thousands of people stand cheek by jowl, refusing to even pay lip service to the social-distancing strictures. The West is in a deep malaise.


Yes, the murder of George Floyd was more than a tragedy. It was an abhorrent display of police brutality that caused public revulsion and understandable demands for justice - demands that, let's not forget, have been met with David Chauvin's arrest and indictment. Moreover, it shone a light on the charged and highly sensitive issue of police brutality in America - though perhaps the prevalence of firearms can at least partially explain the nervous overreactions of some officers. But febrile charges of institutional racism - the accusations that sparked and sustain the protests - just don't stack up. The real story here appears to be the chattering class, bien-pensant willingness to perpetuate lies in an effort to sow division and further demoralise the Western democracies. We must not let them.