Warning: Reader Discretion Advised

Leftists in Springfield are still not done using public schools to preach “woke” beliefs to Illinois school children, thereby driving more families out of Illinois—which is a bad thing for Illinoisans who can’t leave—and driving more families out of government schools—which is a good thing except for those who can’t leave.

State Representative Mary Flowers (D-Chicago) has filed a jaw-dropping bill, HB 80, that doesn’t propose merely “standards,” or “guidelines,” or even a type of curriculum. Oh no, Flowers is going for the whole enchilada. If passed, this bill would mandate the teaching of specific books on race and feminism: 20 non-fiction books and 9 fiction. Every book is written by a leftist. There is not one book in Flowers’ list by either a person of color or a colorless person who criticizes or dissents from leftist assumptions on race or feminism.

Flowers’ bill says,

Amends the School Code. Sets forth a list of nonfiction, fiction, and children’s books about racism that shall [must] be required reading for students in every public elementary and secondary school beginning with the 2021-2022 school year. Requires that the instruction in the material presented by each book be age appropriate and taught at the appropriate grade level. Effectively [sic] immediately.

Maybe I missed it, but I can’t remember ever hearing of a lawmaker commanding that every public school in Illinois teach specific books. Did Mary Flowers’ constituents elect her to select texts for their elementary, middle, and high schools?

Having worked with teachers, I can say with a fair degree of certainty, that this bill will not be popular with many of them.

This proposed bill adds to the list of bills and laws that are transforming our government schools into woke re-education camps and our children into leftists. The list now includes the re-introduced REACH Act that will require comprehensive sex ed starting in kindergarten;  the proposed “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards”; the existing “LGBT” school indoctrination law; the homosexuality- affirming “anti-bullying” law passed in 2010; and the novels, plays, movies, essays, and articles teachers are already choosing to teach.

Here are some of the authors and texts on Flowers’ inclusive list of only leftist authors and texts:

bell hooks: Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

Ta-Nehesi Coates: Between the World and Me

Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers): How to Be an Antiracist

Robin DiAngelo: White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

Ben Crump (opportunist extraordinaire in the mold of Al Sharpton and “Rev.” Jesse Jackson): Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People

Jacquelyn Woodson (black and a lesbian, so a two-fer for intersectional identitarians): Brown Girl Dreaming

Jennifer Harvey (self-described “queer, antiracist-committed … white lesbian/dyke” and Drake University religion professor): Raising White Kids

Jennifer L. Eberhardt: Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do

Mikki Kendall: Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot

Layla F. Saad: Me and White Supremacy

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 

Ijeoma Oluo (identifies as a “a black, queer woman who has often found herself demonized at the convenience of white America): So You Want to Talk About Race

Wesley Lowery: They Can’t Kill Us All

Reni Eddo-Lodge: Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race

Phew. Good thing Coates, Kendi, and DiAngelo are here. No “woke” list would be complete without those three Wokateers—all of whom profit handsomely from the racial division they help foment.

National Review’s Rich Lowry writes this about Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book, which Flowers wants to force all public schools to teach:

Coates has to reduce people to categories and actors in a pantomime of racial plunder to support his worldview. He must erase distinctions and reject complexity.

“‘White America’ is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies,” he writes. What is this “white America”? Is it Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz? Is it Massachusetts, or is it Utah?

In a monstrous passage about 9/11, he writes of the police and firefighters who died trying to save people from getting obliterated into dust: “They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.”

Really? Firefighters go about shattering the bodies of black people without justification?

I suspect there will be many parents who object to their children being exposed to such a toxic ideology.

Here are just two quotes from the book by racist, pro-“trans,” pro-homosexual feminist Reni Eddo-Lodge titled Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race that Mary Flowers wants to force all Illinois schools to teach:

1.) “[R]acism is a white problem. It reveals the anxieties, hypocrisies and double standards of whiteness. It is a problem in the psyche of whiteness that white people must take responsibility to solve.”

2.) “The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist.”

We can’t overlook the list of books Flowers’ bill identifies as fiction, which includes Justin Simien’s satirical book Dear White People. One chapter in Dear White People is titled “So You’ve Decided to ‘Go Black’ and Not Come Back,” which has a section on busting the myth of “Giant Penises,” ,” that is, giant black penises:

Thanks to rap music and the tendency to exoticize people of color, the myth of the giant black d*ck has endured for some time. … the stereotype can lead to a number of awkward postcoital conversations and explanations. Though this stereotype might be helpful in wooing and courtship, there are few things less sexy than a man having to explain why his d*ck isn’t as big as his lover had hoped it would be. The truth is the average d*ck length and width is the same for men regardless of ethnic background. In spite of the sometimes helpful wide-angle lens on the iPhone used in d*ckpic-ing, most guys are packing between five and seven inches.

Please don’t send any email messages to IFI expressing anger that we have reported this. If you’re upset, contact Mary Flowers. She’s the person who wants to make this book required reading in Illinois schools.

Flowers also wants to force Illinois schools to teach bisexual Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, which includes lesbian sex and many references to various characters “f*cking.”

And here’s an excerpt from the novel An American Marriage by Tayari Jones that Flowers wants to force Illinois schools to teach:

Looking down at her outline in the dark, I felt myself wanting to explain again. But I could never tell her that I didn’t want to f*ck her like a man who just got out of jail. I wanted to do it like a man who was home visiting his family. I wanted to do it like a local boy made good. I wanted to f*ck like I had money still, like I had a nice office, Italian shoes, and a steel watch. How can you explain to a woman that you want to f*ck her like a human being?

The married black man in this scene has just been released from spending five years in prison for the crime of raping a white woman—a crime he did not commit. The woman with whom he has sex is a friend—not his wife.

Just curious, who decided graphic lesbian sex was “age-appropriate” for any minor children, and what criteria was used to make such a determination? Who will decide which grade level is appropriate for graphic lesbian sex, language about “f*cking” friends, or about the myth of giant black penises?

While Flowers, evidently a devotee of Critical Race Theory, identity politics, and feminism, includes a few token colorless authors, she includes no ideological diversity, demonstrating that the only kind of diversity that matters to leftists pertains to skin color, biological sex, and disordered sexual predilections. What doesn’t matter is ideological diversity and intellectual exploration on these controversial topics.

In the service of inculcating Illinois minors with “progressive” beliefs about race, feminism, and sexual activities, leftists are fully committed to viewpoint discrimination. They have no interest in teaching children how to think critically via distinguishing sound, coherent arguments buttressed with relevant evidence from fallacious arguments deficient in logic, evidence, and coherence. Instead, they want to teach other people’s children what to think uncritically. Kinda, sorta, maybe sounds more like propaganda than pedagogy.

No one disputes the historical reality of the evil of the slave trade, the institution of slavery, and subsequent Jim Crow laws. Nor does anyone dispute the critical importance of ensuring that history is taught accurately.

The dispute broadly speaking is over how the history of racism should be taught. Many—including blacks—believe the way Critical Race Theory (and BLM and the 1619 Project) addresses slavery in America and its legacy is both imbalanced and inaccurate.

Further, the imbalanced and inaccurate coverage of American history promotes a false picture of an evil and systemically racist America, foments racial division, and robs persons of color of a sense of agency in and responsibility for their own lives.

In the racialist—or some would say racist—theories of those whose writing Mary Flowers wants to force into Illinois schools, there’s a difference between being an “antiracist” and being not racist. Being antiracist essentially means embracing all the beliefs of Critical Race Theory, including forced confession and public repentance by whites, and becoming a community organizer. According to the ubiquitous Ibram X. Kendi,

Being antiracist is different for white people than it is for people of color. For white people, being antiracist evolves with their racial identity development. They must acknowledge and understand their privilege, work to change their internalized racism, and interrupt racism when they see it.

Many believe those dogmatic beliefs are divisive and destructive and will accomplish nothing but feed the greedy Intersectional Industrial Complex. And many non-racist parents do not want their children taught the lie that those who harbor no racist views or engage in any racist acts are still racist by virtue of their skin color or lack thereof.

If Flowers and other leftists are genuinely invested in sound education—which necessarily entails the full and free exchange of ideas on race, race relations, feminism, and sexuality—they could and should revise both this bill and existing curricula on these subjects. They could and should remove half of the non-fiction selections to make room for books and essays by Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter, Carol Swain, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Jason Riley, Anne Wortham, and Heather MacDonald.

Take ACTION: Click HERE to send a message to your state representative to ask him/her vote against this outrageous proposal that usurps the jurisdiction of local school boards and administrators by mandating specific left-wing reading assignments.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Springfield-STILL-Isnt-Done-Indoctrinating-Children.mp3

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I had awarded Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey the award for Most Cringeworthy Performative Act/photo op of 2020 for his fake body-wracking sobbing while kneeling at George Floyd’s casket. Frey’s performative act/photo op topped even that of the genuflecting congressional thespians adorned in culturally appropriated African kente-clothe scarves led by prayer warrior Nancy Pelosi.

You might want to take some Zofran 30 minutes before watching this:

But now I must rescind the award and give it to the dozen apparently racist celebrities publicly confessing and self-flagellating before the Black Lives Matter Crusaders for their collective, systemic white transgressions.

In melodramatically somber tones, lesbian Sarah Paulson, Aaron Paul, bisexual Kesha (formerly Ke$ha), Bethany Joy Lenz, Kristen Bell, Justin Theroux,  Debra Messing, Mark Duplass, Bryce Dallas Howard (Ron Howard’s daughter), Julianne Moore, Piper Perabo, Stanley Tucci, Ilana Glazer, and gymnast Aly Raisman are taking responsibility for “every unchecked moment, for every time it was easier to ignore than to call it out for what it was, for every not-so-funny joke, every unfair stereotype, every blatant injustice, no matter how big or small, every time” they “remained silent,” and “every time” they “explained away police brutality, or turned a blind eye.”

Eleven of the twelve sanctimonious celebrities work in an industry rife with sexism and exploitation of women and now we learn they are also, apparently, guilty of racism. While profiting from one of the most hypocritical and destructive industries in the country that creates and promotes soft-core porn and glorifies violence, all these self-indulgent, privileged celebrities are now confessing to being racists.

Are they really responsible for every not-so-funny joke, unfair stereotype, and blatant injustice in the world? Did all twelve of them really explain away police brutality? If that’s true, they have a lot to atone for.

The moralizers/offenders identify what they see from their snazzy digs:

Black people are being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes. Going for a job should not be a death sentence. Sleeping in your own home should not be a death sentence. Playing video games with your nephew should not be a death sentence. Shopping in a store should not be a death sentence. Business as usual should not be life-threatening.

No disagreement. Is there anyone in America who believes black people should be slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, killed while playing video games with their relatives, or killed while shopping?

But is there a pervasive problem with black people being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes, or murdered while shopping? Well, yes, there is, but the slaughtering of blacks—including innocent children sitting on their porches, sleeping in their beds, and walking home from school—is being committed primarily by young black men raised without fathers.

Here are some data from scholar Heather MacDonald that the celebrity social justice warriors may want to consider:

However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is. …

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

Of course, everyone knows the celebrity pontificators aren’t really confessing and don’t really feel guilty. They’re doing what socially insular, intellectually myopic, presumptuous, and self-righteous celebrities do best: scold the deplorables—oh, and act.

What other icky cultural manifestations of kowtowing to the destructive Marxist ideologies of BLM and Antifa fascists are emerging? Here are a few:

• As of this writing, Seattle, a sanctuary city with a plague of homelessness, is now a lawless Antifa/BLM enclave, which has been named the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ). At the command of political leaders, Seattle police surrendered the entire 6-block area to anarchists, including their own police precinct, which has been renamed “Seattle People’s Department East Precinct.” Leftists promptly erected borders around their zone and appointed a defacto armed police department. Lawlessness and chaos–which ultimately result in tyranny–are the logical ends of “progressivism.” Next up, the Purge. If current policemen all across this once-great nation walked off the job and BLM members took over “protecting” our rights and communities, would we have less racism, fewer bad “cops,” and communities better suited for human flourishing? I wonder if any businesses will open stores or corporate headquarters in Seattle? I wonder if any families will move there? Other than anarchists and zombies, who will want to move there?

• There are a number of candidates vying for the title of “Progressive” Hypocrite of the Pandemic Year. Top of the list is Michigan governor Christine Whitmer, or as Andrew Klavan calls her, “Obersturmfuhrer Whitmer, ” who prohibited Michiganders from buying seeds or paint when they were shopping at Home Depot, who told Michiganders not to travel north on Memorial Day weekend as her husband traveled north on Memorial Day weekend to get their essential boat on the water early, and who banned lawn care workers from mowing lawns—alone. Well, here she is marching shoulder-to-shoulder with BLM. Sheltering in place is good for thee but not for she when there’s a campaign for the vice presidency that needs a photo op. #PerformativeAct
  Does anyone think that if there had been hundreds of thousands of conservatives marching peacefully in streets for the past two weeks to protest the crushing quarantine—with zero rioting, arson, looting, and brick-throwing—that leftist quarantine zealots would have been silent? Or would there have been mass rage, rending of clothes, and sanctimonious scoldings over the iniquitous disregard for human life demonstrated by demonstrators?

• The mob is coming for your jobs. John Daniel Davidson writing for The Federalist warns that your position on BLM has consequences:

There will be no opting out of the Black Lives Matter movement. You’re either for BLM or against it—and if you’re against it, you’re a racist. You will either support BLM publicly and enthusiastically, or you will be harassed, shunned, and shamed out of mainstream America. If you dare to speak a word against BLM, you will be targeted, mobbed, and probably fired.

• Leftists now want to burn books (and movies and historical monuments), but since they can’t actually say that, they had to figure out a way to conceal that they want to burn books. What to do, what to do? 💡Brainstorm!Just rename book-burning. Call it “decolonizing your bookshelf.” Oh, and when you’re done with all that decolonizing, call the Firemen:

Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. (Captain Beatty, Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury).

We just put our American flag up at our house. I think it’s going to stay up for a while. I am deeply thankful to live in America where “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” and where our forefathers wrote, “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

This is a remarkable country built on principles that enable it to become “a more perfect Union” as long as we remember the Creator who endowed us with Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no unalienable Rights. Without a Creator, there exist no transcendent truths, no moral absolutes. Un-created human lives don’t matter. Un-created humans create and inhabit a world of highly intelligent dogs eating dogs.

I hope Christians who, in the face of slander, hostility, and threats, offer feeble, vapid defenses of their silence on issues that both culture and Scripture address realize that 1. We the people are the government, 2. Children are watching as parents model cowardice and rationalization, and 3. Silent capitulators are feeding the behemoth that will devour their children’s and grandchildren’s hearts, minds, liberty, and maybe their bodies.

But by all means continue. Take up your crosses daily, and hide them in the basement.

Listen to this article read by Laurie: 

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/nauseating-performative-acts-by-celebrity-racists.mp3

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Many years ago, I witnessed what happens when people who prevent others from speaking are not dealt with promptly.

During a “Firing Line” taping with William F. Buckley at Bard College in New York State on the topic of “Resolved: The ACLU is full of baloney” (the short answer is “yes”), two female activists stood up and started chanting “women of color have no voice.”

The moderator, a well-known liberal (well, okay, it was Michael Kinsley, who did an otherwise fine job), asked them politely to stop so the debate could continue, but the protesters refused.  At this point, he could have motioned to the campus cops to remove them, but instead let them go on ad nauseum.  I leaned over and whispered to then-ACLU President Nadine Strossen, “Nadine, do something. They’re your children.”  I meant her ideological offspring, of course.  And she did try to reason with them, to no avail.

Unlike some recent incidents, the debate finally went on after Mr. Kinsley gave in to the protesters’ tantrum, let them read a list of nonsensical leftwing ultimatums, and Bard’s president agreed to leave the team he was on in the debate.

I’m not sure how much of this made the eventual PBS broadcast, but it showed the folly of giving in to the heckler’s veto.  That’s when, in the name of free speech, someone silences someone else.  Courts have made it clear that the heckler’s veto is not protected speech under the First Amendment, no more than falsely yelling “fire” in a crowded theater.

Since President Trump’s election, the Left has been in full heckler’s veto mode, egged on by the same progressives who cheered the violent Occupy mobs in 2011 and 2012 and the goons disrupting the Trump rallies last year.

[Recently], protesters threated violence against Republican Party participants in the 82^nd Avenue of Roses Parade in Portland, Oregon, and managed to get the event canceled.   An anonymous email promised that “two hundred or more people” would “rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out…. police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely.”

Then, amid threats of violence, conservative author Ann Coulter was forced to cancel her speech at the University of California, Berkeley.  In February, the campus had suffered $100,000 in property damage when black-clad leftist rioters stopped iconoclast Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking.

In March, political scientist Charles Murray was forced to change venues at Middlebury College in Vermont during a mob attack in which a female professor was injured.  Middlebury itself may be failing to teach about constitutional rights, if a letter signed by 450 alumni prior to Murray’s appearance is any indication:  “This is not an issue of freedom of speech.  In this case we find the principle does not apply.”

Well, okay then. Disagree with us and you lose your rights.

In early April, hundreds of activists blocked an auditorium at Claremont McKenna College in California to prevent author Heather MacDonald from speaking.  Ms. MacDonald’s analysis of crime statistics blows away the media narrative about racist cops spun by the Black Lives Matter movement.  No wonder they wanted her silenced.

For the Left, the issues themselves matter less than a show of force.  As author Angelo M. Codevilla has observed, “The point of PC [political correctness] is not and has never been merely about any of the items that it imposes, but about the imposition itself.”

In “State and Revolution” (1918), Vladimir Lenin wrote:

“The replacement of the bourgeois (middle class) by the proletariat state is impossible without a violent revolution … it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush its resistance.”

Even if none of this involves something you hold dear, the mobs will get around to you if you’re out of step.  A byproduct is the chilling effect it has had on discourse in general.

I recall when liberals and conservatives could agree to disagree during, say, a party, and leave as friends, or at least not as enemies.  But when’s the last time you went to an eclectic gathering and heard genuine views exchanged?  Nobody dares anymore.  The Left’s scorched-earth tactics have poisoned the well.

In Massachusetts, an editorial at The Wellesley News on April 12 openly advocated attacking anyone who fails to bow to leftwing orthodoxy.  Their definition of what will not be allowed includes “racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia or any other type of discriminatory speech.  Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech.”

The good little Maoists (who are punctuation-challenged) went on to declare, “if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted.” Later, they denied that this meant engaging in violence.

Incidentally, Hillary Clinton’s alma mater charges about $63,300 annually for tuition, room and board.  Apparently, that buys the finest brainwashing against the bourgeoisie that a campus can conjure.

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This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

The snowflake metaphor for Millennials who quash speech they don’t like seems particularly inapt. These petulant ruffians are more like jackhammers.

Snowflakes are delicate, silent, complex, singular, ineffably beautiful, and naturally occurring. They fall from the sky through no human intervention.

In contrast, jackhammers are brute, noisy, simplistic, uniform, and ugly creations of man that destroy the seemingly indestructible foundations of the buildings in which we live and the solid paths on which we trod.

Millennials who stomp through the streets, smashing windows and shouting obscenities and witless slogans to protest the expression of ideas they don’t like from Ann Coulter, Heather MacDonald, and Charles Murray are not snowflakes. They’re jackhammers.

They aren’t hurt or offended. They’re outraged at the audacity of anyone who dares to utter ideas with which they disagree. They’re poseurs. They don’t need safe spaces, therapy dogs, coddling or mollycoddling. And they know it.

These fake victims/real jack hammers are the ugly, noisy, brute creations of a Frankensteinian culture. Who is our Victor Frankenstein? Victor is our schools, our heterodox churches, our professional mental health communities, and our storytellers (that is, Hollywood).

Many are aware of the jackhammering of presentations by Coulter, MacDonald, and Murray because those attacks on the First Amendment have been well-covered by FOX News. A lesser known attack was perpetrated against the inestimable scholar Anthony Esolen, who until last week taught at Providence College (aptly called PC), a supposedly Catholic college in Rhode Island. Writing on Public Discourse, Michael Bradley, a graduate student in theology at the University of Notre Dame, offers this description http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/03/18900/ of Dr. Esolen, a prolific writer who contributes to Crisis and Touchstone magazines:

Anthony Esolen is the contemporary incarnation of GK Chesterton. The simple and beautiful prose, the acute diagnostic precision, the commonsense appeal to and on behalf of everyday things, the recipe for renewal—all these things Esolen shares with Chesterton, the preeminent cultural physician of the early twentieth century. Like Chesterton, Esolen bluntly identifies our problems. And like him, Esolen’s solution centers on God and faith, learning and virtue, and a robust sense of human nature.

What, you may be wondering, so incensed the jackhammers at this tiny Catholic-in-Name-Only (CAMO) College that camouflages itself as a Catholic school and lies in wait for unsuspecting Catholic students? Here is an excerpt from the essay Dr. Esolen wrote about intellectual diversity at PC for the Catholic magazine Crisis that got the jackhammers’ motors roaring:

[T]here is no evidence on our Diversity page that we wish to be what God has called us to be, a committedly and forthrightly Catholic school with life-changing truths to bring to the world. It is as if, deep down, we did not really believe it. So let us suppose that a professor should affirm some aspect of the Church’s teaching as regards the neuralgia of our time, sex. Will his right to do so be confirmed by those who say they are committed to diversity? Put it this way. Suppose someone were to ask, “Is it permitted for a secular liberal, at a secular and liberal college, to affirm in the classroom a secular view of sex and the family?” The question would strike everyone as absurd. It would be like asking whether we were permitted to walk on two feet or to look up at the sky. Then why should it not also be absurd to ask, “Is it permitted for a Catholic, at a college that advertises itself as Catholic, to affirm a Catholic view of sex and the family?” And I am not talking merely about professors whose specific job it is to teach moral philosophy or moral theology. I am talking about all professors.

In my now extensive experience, Catholic professors in Catholic colleges have been notably tolerant of the limitations of their secular colleagues. We make allowances all the time. We understand, though, that some of them—not all, but then it only takes a few—would silence us for good, if they had the power. They have made life hell for more than one of my friends. All, now, in the name of an undefined and perhaps undefinable diversity, to which you had damned well better give honor and glory. If you don’t—and you may not even be aware of the lese majeste as you commit it—you’d better have eyes in the back of your head. 

In response, students protested on campus and created a petition signed by students and 40 faculty members in which they pledged to break the silence surrounding the allegedly hateful statements Dr. Esolen made.

I kid you not. Campus Leftists claimed that campus Leftists have been silent about matters related to “diversity” in general and homosexuality in particular.

Worse still the administration refused to meet with Dr. Esolen and a group of other Catholic professors to discuss the issues surrounding diversity (or the lack thereof).

We should by now see the danger in the “hate speech” ideology. Hatred has been redefined to mean absence of  affirmation of all the desires, beliefs, and actions of culturally favored elites. Hatred no longer denotes antipathy toward persons but disagreement with moral claims. To be more accurate, it means disagreement with “progressive” moral claims.

Once hatred was redefined, the Left needed to persuade society that hatred leads to acts of violence via words and then persuade them that acts of violence can be prevented only by banning the hateful words that Leftists claim lead ineluctably to hateful deeds. Voila! The First Amendment is “disappeared.”

Jackhammers believe that if the claim that homoerotic activity is immoral and destructive to individual lives and the public good is spoken, then someone may, in response, say or do ugly things to those who identify as homosexual.

Jackhammers are right. Someone may do something ugly. And whenever jackhammers express the idea that all who hold homoerotic activity as perverse are hateful haters, someone may say or do something ugly to those purported haters. There’s no way to escape or prevent all the dastardly deeds that fallen human beings commit. That’s why we have laws: to prevent and penalize egregiously harmful deeds.

But our Founding Fathers rightly saw that the suppression of speech poses a far greater danger to individuals and the public good than does the abuse that some humans may engage in as a result of hearing ideas.

The mellifluous-sounding babble that has been pouring out of the professional mental health community, our pseudo-educational government  school industry, mainline churches, and Hollywood has taught that self-esteem can grow only when sinful humans are affirmed in their sinful choices and their ids are fed and watered. If we want a metaphor from nature for the juveniles who attack a man of such integrity, wisdom, courage, and intellectual depth as Dr. Esolen, it would not be snowflakes. What we have grown in our cultural hothouses are prickly, unlovely weeds who are taking over the well-tended gardens of civilization.

“Progressives” believe that if we ban the expression of ideas that don’t tickle the ears of “progressives,” we will create utopia. But what about those words that are expressed in print or virtual print? If people shouldn’t be allowed to speak ideas “progressives” find undesirable, why should they be allowed to have them published or posted?  And what about the phenomenon that precedes even speech: thoughts. Just imagine if liberals could find a way to access those.

The good news is that God has worked some ugly things at Providence College together for good for Dr. Esolen, which he describes in a recent heart-melting essay in Crisis Magazine from which this excerpt is taken:

Sometimes a single encounter with what is healthy and ordinary…is enough to shake you out of the bad dreams of disease and confusion. If it isn’t quite yet like meeting Saint Francis on the road, it is like meeting a bluff and jovial fellow who has just come from a conversation with that great little man of God.

I’ve had such an encounter, at Thomas More College, in New Hampshire.

Dr. Esolen’s describes his encounter with devotion to God and love of beauty and truth among both students and faculty at Thomas More College, which led to his decision to leave his tenured position at Providence College for a new position at Thomas More where he will teach and help found a center dedicated to furthering the college’s mission “to wed virtue and scholarship, contemplation with cultural engagement”:

I have countless memories of fine students at Providence College, some of whom are now my close friends; and to my colleagues in Western Civilization—of whom many have retired and some have passed away—I owe a debt I can never repay, for their friendship and support and instruction. But I am too old to want to spend the evening of my career trying to shore up a crumbling wall, when those who are in authority at the college are unwilling to listen to our pleas, or even to meet with us so that we can make the pleas in person….

No, I’d prefer to be in on building something exciting for the Church and for sheer ordinary humanity: The Center for Cultural Renewal, at Thomas More College.

…

A window shuts, and a door opens—or rather the very roof is blown off, and I see again, in their silent and ordinary beauty, the stars.

IFI was deeply blessed and honored to have Dr. Esolen as one of our banquet speakers two years ago.  To be edified by the man jackhammers tried to crush, watch this:

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