Is The Tide Finally Turning On Woke Weirdness?

Associate Dean of DEI, Tirien Steinbach explaining to Judge Duncan how much she values freedom of speech, as long as it's her speech.

Could it be that some chinks are appearing in the armour of wokeness that is suffocating this part of the world? If the incident at Stanford University in California last week is any indication, we may finally be seeing the beginning of the end of this scourge.

This latest tantrum of the spoiled American college students and their misguided administrators was a pretty standard display of self-righteous virtue signalling. Standard in the sense that it's what we've come to expect from these sorts of institutions and their leadership.

You could tell these guys were serious and the cream of the crop of America's brightest when they came into the room bearing signs that read, among other things, “BE PRONOUN NOT PRO-BIGOT”. Evidently English grammar is not stressed all that much at Stanford.

The fact that these hecklers were actually law students in the throes of cancelling a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge is a good bit of irony that was evidently lost on the majority of them. I'd love to be in the room when one these newly minted lawyers shows up for court on a Monday morning two years from now and the judge is that very same Judge Kyle Duncan. That would be awesome. I'm quite sure he'll remember that lawyer.

And since the students apparently hadn't done a thorough enough job of humiliating themselves and their school, the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (of course) Tirien Steinbach decided she would get up and whip out her prepared speech. In the middle of her remarks, she felt the need to ask Judge Duncan if what he had to say was really so important that it was “worth this impact” on the students. Of course she would never find out how important the judge's words were because she was too busy talking and eventually the judge had to be escorted from the room by federal marshals for his own safety.

It's a good thing Ms. Steinbach happened to have a five minute speech all written out “just in case” there was an incident. It was also very thoughtful of her to interrupt the judge in order to tell him how supportive she was of free speech as long as it wasn't the kind of free speech that made her students uncomfortable.

The reason for shutting down the meeting is completely irrelevant of course, because as we all know, reason and logic are secondary to the virtue-signals that are every student's right of passage in the world of American universities. Thankfully these tender souls had all the encouragement they required in the person of their Dean of DEI, because diversity and inclusion don'tcha know…

This reminds me of yet another morsel of irony in the whole diversity, equity, and inclusion thing. If it wasn't obvious before, at least now we've got an accurate idea that this DEI regime doesn't extend to diversity of thought, or equity for someone you don't like, or inclusion of someone with a different viewpoint than yours.

I'm shocked…

This kind of leadership is precisely the kind I wrote about only a couple weeks ago, in Canada's Biggest Crisis is a Crisis in Leadership.

I realize that what I just described is hardly a bright spot in any nation's history, but I mention it in order to add context for what transpired afterward.

In the midst of all this, it seems that there was at least one adult in leadership at Stanford that week. Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez found her big-girl panties and wrote a very long and scathing rebuke to the students and the aforementioned Dean of DEI (who also received a spur-of-the-moment holiday of undetermined length). Martinez seems to be bucking the trend of spineless and incompetent leaders like we've heard so much about in recent years.

Martinez also made apologies to Judge Duncan on behalf of the college and the students and as an added flourish, she actually stood by the apology even in the face of more whining and (gasp) another protest outside her classroom from the students she had apologized for.

We can only hope that other schools across the country were watching and learning from Jenny Martinez. And then us northerners can hope it makes its way across the border as well.

There are also other signs that this moral panic of wokeness may finally be subsiding at least a little bit.

Parents of students in southern Ontario (that Canadian bastion of wokified wierdness) have been voicing their concerns here, here, and here. This is exactly how it needs to happen, because as long as the peasants stay silent, the rulers think they can get away with anything they want.

I wrote this a while ago in, The Paralyzing Fear Of Making Important Decisions

Here's the thing: waiting for the leadership to figure this shit out only ensures that they never will. The leadership figures it out when they sense that the majority of their people are demanding that they figure it out.

That is what's beginning to happen now. I love hearing these stories because the more these stories come out, the easier it will be for other parents, co-workers, voters, students, and whomever else to follow suit.

As I've been saying for a long time now, the biggest issues in politics today are not issues of right vs left, but authoritarianism vs libertarianism, or some acceptable point on that gradient. The guiding principles of the woke movement are authoritarian in nature and that's what's led many on the left to begin denouncing it as well.

As Susan Neiman says, The true Left is not woke and many of them are getting tired of being thought of that way.

Without Freedom of Speech There is No Freedom. And freedom of speech isn’t just about being able to say what you want to say - it’s also about being able to hear what you want to hear. So, at Stanford last week, it wasn’t just Judge Duncan’s rights that were stomped on, but the rights of every student that showed up there in order to hear him speak. People on both sides of the aisle are finally beginning to see that and I'm very optimistic that soon we'll be able to look back on this rather lame chapter in our history and just shake our heads.

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Here are some of the links to my other articles on this subject:

There is No Freedom Without Freedom of Speech

What's the Big Deal About Freedom?

Canada's Biggest Crisis is a Crisis in Leadership

The Paralyzing Fear Of Making Important Decisions