UC Berkeley Archives - Dr. Rich Swier

Tag Archive for: UC Berkeley

Feminist Gender Theorist Explains Hamas Raping Jewish Women is ‘Resistance’

March 9, 2024/in Culture War, Healthcare, Hot Topics, Must Read, News, Policy, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Jihad Watch

Feminist gender theorists begin by declaring that women don’t exist and then conclude by justifying their rape and murder.

Judith Butler has always been ahead of her time.

She was ahead of her time in adopting pronouns and in promoting gender theory. And all the way back in 2006, the feminist gender theorist and UC Berkeley academic declared that Hamas was progressive.

“Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.”

Like most fanatics, Oct 7 only made Judith Butler double down on her belief in the progressive qualities of Hamas.

Judith Butler describing the October 7 massacre as armed resistance: “We can have different views about Hamas as a political party, we can have different views about armed resistance. But […] the uprising of October 7th was an act of armed resistance.[…] This was an uprising” pic.twitter.com/YWqak847lx

— Joseph Hirsch (@josephhirsch5) March 4, 2024

“We can have different views about Hamas as a political party, we can have different views about armed resistance. But […] the uprising of October 7th was an act of armed resistance,” Butler recently declared.

Butler’s brand of gender theory had begun the deconstruction of the idea that women exist. A few years ago, Butler was claiming the “trans” brand and arguing that “the category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way.”

Feminist gender theorists begin by declaring that women don’t exist and then conclude by justifying their rape and murder.

AUTHOR

DANIEL GREENFIELD

RELTATED ARTICLES:

While Gazans Throw US Aid in Trash, Biden Builds Pier to Bring Them More

How the Hamas Hawks Fluttered the Israeli Dovecotes

In State of the Union Speech, Biden Parrots Hamas Statistics

Spain increases funding to Hamas-linked UNRWA by $21,868,000

Palestinian Authority Commits to Hamas Unity Government to Fight Israel

Biden regime to vote for UN resolution demanding immediate ceasefire in Gaza of at least six weeks’ duration

IDF warning: Iran arming Venezuela with weapons ‘very capable of hitting U.S.’

Biden Uses State of the Union to Threaten Civil War

UK: Pro-Hamas savages spray-paint and slash historic painting of Lord Balfour at University of Cambridge

America’s most left-wing university launches ‘Journal of Right-Wing Studies’

July 28, 2023/in Culture War, Education, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Social Issues/by MercatorNet - Navigating Modern Complexities

A band of academics from America’s most left-wing university have just launched a new journal for “right-wing studies”. What could possibly go wrong?

If one were to write a detailed chronology of the cancel culture phenomenon, the University of California, Berkeley, would feature prominently.

This fact is somewhat ironic given UC Berkeley’s pivotal role in the 1960s Free Speech Movement.

Nevertheless, a parade of conservative and other non-woke figures have been harassed, harangued and otherwise driven off UC Berkeley’s campus since the late 2010s. Deserving or not, Milo Yiannopolous, Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro are among its more prominent victims.

Given the university’s penchant for progressive censorship, it is refreshing to note one of its on-campus think tanks is launching a journal to study the rise of left-wing illiberalism.

Oh wait, sorry… I mean right-wing illiberalism.

Yes, UC Berkeley’s Center for Right-Wing Studies (CRWS), founded in 2009 in the wake of the Tea Party movement, has just announced the launch of its Journal of Right-Wing Studies.

Skewed perspective

Chaired by the centre’s founder Dr Lawrence Rosenthal, CRWS is part of Berkeley’s Institute of the Study of Societal Issues (ISSI). The new journal will continue the research unit’s ostensible mission, which is “the study of right-wing movements in the 20th and 21st centuries”. Dr Rosenthal is the journal’s Editor in Chief.

As one writer for the California Globe put it, “all of Berkeley is one giant leftist science experiment”, so it makes sense the campus would launch a journal “to study the ‘right wing’ as if peering at Ebola under a microscope.”

In fairness to CRWS, that same writer noted that it is not just another politically-biased institute being run on the taxpayer’s dime: the centre has only one part-time employee and its expenses are covered by private donations.

The California Globe also praised the CRWS for acknowledging “that its staff could not be even remotely described as ‘right wing’ and therefore they understand their own bias”.

Even so, the bias is unmistakable.

Rosenthal has justified the journal’s launch by claiming we are in “a period of extraordinary right-wing mobilization across the globe”.

He warns of “militant movements” cheering for autocracy in Western nations, whose focus is “on maintaining ethnic, religious, gender, and racial hierarchies in the name of ‘traditional’ values versus the imposition of the ‘woke” agenda’. Rosenthal continues:

Such a government has come to power in Italy. Red states in the USA are copying the model of Hungary’s Orbán government by institutionalizing in law restrictions on voting, on education, on the independence of the judiciary, and even on corporate behavior.

Absent from Rosenthal’s analysis is any mention of government censorship, workplace and campus speech codes, cancel culture, job loss for political dissidents, mandated medical treatments, or the prohibition of movement for healthy citizens.

And why would he mention such trends, since they have been driven almost exclusively by the political left?

Strawmen

Indeed, the rights of the individual, once enshrined in a host of mid-20th century declarations and aspired to globally, are under immense threat predominantly from one side of politics — and not the side Rosenthal thinks.

So one-eyed is Rosenthal and his Centre for Right-Wing Studies that he claims “the magnitude and political successes of this new right is not paralleled by successes of an extreme left”.

Antifa, anyone? Black Lives Matter? The trans cult? Activist school teachers, sporting bodies and CEOs? Censorious social media platforms? The prestige media’s expulsion of woke critics? A weaponised Federal Government and spy apparatus?

“If others see it that way,” Rosenthal sneers, “a CLWS [Centre for Left-Wing Studies] would be an appropriate vehicle”.

For further evidence of the journal’s bias, consider various quotes from the Roundtable section of its inaugural edition.

The Republican Party, writes one contributor, which was formerly merely conservative, has “transformed into a fully-fledged far-right party”.

Another opines that:

The right’s racist, sexist, xenophobic, heteronormative, corporate-capitalist nostalgia for some imagined earlier version of the nation is cataclysmic for the socially vulnerable and threatens the loss of our democracy. Misinformation campaigns rampage over mass and social media, allowing ignorance and amnesia to reign. The courts are packed and systematically deleting human rights, electoral districts have been [re]drawn, the right is heavily armed and talking about violence against the left.

Or consider a 2019 conference held by the Centre for Right-Wing Studies, co-sponsored by the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center. Its speaking topics essentially cast the entire conservative movement as a haunt for alt-right, women-hating white supremacists:

Be Rough, Be Violent, Don’t Drop Her On the Floor: The Christian Right’s Enactment of Female Purity through Evangelical Ballet Technique.
A Time of War: The Rhetoric and Reality of the Theocratic Far Right’s Anti-Abortion ‘Crusade’
Klandidates: American Politics and the Ku Klux Klan
Forging Fascism: Authoritarian Populism, Apocalyptic Aggression, and Scripted Violence
My Girlfriend Became Neo-Nazi: The Right’s Presence and Activity in the Internet

In short, Rosenthal’s CRWS tends to view the “Right Wing” in light of its most extreme elements. Almost entirely absent in his centre’s new journal is any discussion of conservatism’s philosophical underpinnings — whether Edmund Burke, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Willmoore Kendall, Whittaker Chambers or Russell Kirk.

Rosenthal is right. A ‘Journal for Left-Wing Studies’ is sorely needed — if for no other reason than to study Rosenthal’s centre like Ebola through a microscope.

But it will have to find a different home.

It would be singularly unwelcome at UC Berkeley.

AUTHOR

KURT MAHLBURG

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adult pastor.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Conservatives are changing K-12 education, and one Christian college is at the center

Taliban Destroys What Is Left of Afghanistan’s Universities

Our Future Elites Are Being Taught Anti-White Propaganda at Universities

GOP Senator Demands Investigation Into California University’s Reported $220 Million China Campus Deal

June 13, 2023/in Education, Hot Topics, News, Policy, Politics, Science, Social Issues/by The Daily Caller

A Republican senator is calling for an investigation into the University of California, Berkeley’s reported multimillion dollar deal with a Chinese university, according to a letter obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Indiana Republican Todd Young urged the Department of Education (DOE) to investigate whether any U.S. laws were violated related to Berkeley’s reported $220 million joint venture with China’s “state-owned” Tsinghua University to build a 1.7 million-square-foot research campus in Shenzhen, known as Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI), according to the letter sent to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona Friday. According to The Daily Beast, who broke the story in May 2023, Berkeley allegedly failed to report the foreign funding for the TBSI project to the Department of Education in possible violation of the law, which Berkeley disputes.

“The longevity, scope, and origin of the funding is concerning,” Young’s letter states, “but what that funding provided to the Chinese is equally, if not more so, concerning from a national security perspective.”

The Daily Beast reported that, between 2014 and 2018, the TBSI project allegedly received $220 million from the Shenzhen government as well as a $19 million investment from Tsinghua University that was backed by a grant from a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

Furthermore, Berkeley allegedly failed to report any of these foreign funds to the DOE prior to being contacted for comment by The Daily Beast in February 2023, according to the outlet.

Young’s letter asks the DOE to investigate whether or not Berkeley may have violated “existing U.S. law with regards to the disclosure of foreign gifts.”

In May 2023, Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor of Berkeley, told the DCNF that although the university had indeed signed a “Master Affiliation Agreement” with Tsinghua University in 2016 that “arranged” for $22 million in “sponsored research” and “startup operations,” Berkeley has allegedly never received, nor benefitted from, a $220 million investment “made by the Shenzhen government, or any other entity in China.”

“UC Berkeley has no ownership of any of the facilities in Shenzhen and no agreements or plans to receive ownership interest in them,” Mogulof told the DCNF. “Therefore, UC Berkeley is not required to report this funding under Department of Education Section 117 guidelines.”

Young also expressed concern that the Chinese government may have “received other, more tangible, benefits from its arrangement with UC Berkeley,” according to his letter.

Between 2012 and 2021, Berkeley allegedly received over $4 billion in federal research funding from the Department of Defense and other government agencies, according to Young’s letter.

Therefore, TBSI may have allegedly benefited from “competencies, experience and expertise funded by the American taxpayer,” which China could have subsequently exploited, Young’s letter claims.

“Recent reporting calls into question the adequacy of existing guardrails to protect the security and integrity of American institutions of higher education from the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese government,” Young’s letter states.

Berkeley’s Mogulof told the DCNF that the university “takes concerns about national security very seriously” and will review “past agreements and actions involving or connected to the TBSI to reconfirm that all required reporting and compliance has occurred.”

DOE did not respond immediately to the DCNF’s request for comment and The Daily Beast declined to comment.

AUTHOR

PHILIP LENCZYCKI

Daily Caller News Foundation investigative reporter, political journalist, and China watcher. Twitter: @LenczyckiPhilip

RELATED ARTICLES:

Chinese Intel Arm Quietly Operates ‘Service Centers’ In 7 US Cities

UC Berkeley Failed To Disclose $220 Million Deal That Benefitted Sanctioned Chinese Companies: REPORT

Communist Chinese Propaganda In U.S. School Textbooks

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

UC Berkeley: White Students to Purchase ‘Free Speech insurance’

February 3, 2016/in Commentary, Satire/by The Peoples Cube

The University of California has adopted a new policy requiring all students who identify with being Caucasian to purchase mandatory “Free Speech Insurance” as part of enrollment fees, $1,000 per-semester, set to begin in the fall semester of 2016.

The idea had been bouncing around for about a year until the UC Board of Trustees was able to put all the logistics in place. The concept of mandatory Free Speech Insurance (FSI) is based on the belief that “free speech” and “safe spaces” on campus are mutually exclusive as they stem from fundamentally different belief systems that are diametrically opposed to one another.

“Words that express unadulterated individual thought are by definition hurtful to those who do not experience such thoughts,” stated professor Lilly Barnes, instructor in Modern Ethics and Safe-Think during an open forum dedicated to explaining the new policy to students. “Only by suppressing individual thought and following standards of pre-approved collective thought prepared for you by caring academic professionals, can we achieve the safety of thinking in unison and make our campus a safe space for everyone. This is what my mandatory course in Safe-Think will help you to achieve.”

“The problem with this country,” continued Barnes, “is that freely expressed individual ideas almost always lead to delusional thoughts and perceptions that can be described as anti-progressive, racist, sexist, bigoted, or Islamophobic. Unfortunately, we can’t yet jail people for unfiltered expression of their Caucasianism as it exists in their unguided and dangerously delusional minds. As a result, many minority students are constantly bombarded with white and heteronormative micro-aggressions, which causes them to suffer extreme mental and emotional traumas. So the next best thing to arresting all white students is to make them purchase mandatory Free Speech Insurance that will be used to compensate for any emotional damage minority students may suffer in accidents caused by unapproved speech or any other expression of non-safe individual thought on our campus.”

“Minority students will be exempt from purchasing FSI because we believe they are incapable of individual thought and don’t have the capacity to reason and act independently,” Barnes said. “But a white mouth that is free to speak, is no less dangerous than an assault machine gun. I see it everywhere I go on this campus. I become alarmed whenever I see a group of white students standing around without a single minority in their midst. I am not deaf, I can clearly hear them talk about things like movies, or video games, or even sports – without acknowledging how their white privilege provided them with those opportunities. It makes me want to vomit.”

Professor Barnes further illustrated her point with a recent example of the damages caused by unregulated freedom of expression on campus. It happened when an African-American student overheard a group of Asian students saying that the boycott of the Oscars was “ridiculous” while they were all having lunch in one of the University’s cafeterias. The fact that this blatant microaggression did not come directly from Caucasian students made things even worse, as the well-trained African-American student was still able to detect white racism compounded by cultural appropriation, which raised the incident classification to “aggravated assault.” This made the African-American student so emotionally distraught that they could not attend class for three weeks and now they require costly biweekly therapy visits.

That is where Free Speech Insurance will come in. It will cover the cost of the therapy and rehabilitation of victims of unregulated, freely expressed Caucasian ideas. Even in cases when the offensive speech does not come from white students directly but is culturally appropriated from them by misguided minorities, the burden of payment will still be distributed among the Caucasians whose fault it is that offensive ideas exist in the first place.

To further the University’s goal of making the campus “a universal safe space,” the institution has also announced that it will be removing courses that focus on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights since those documents are believed to “encourage division and bigotry among the student body” by promoting criminally delusional ideas of individual freedom, thought, and expression. These courses will be replaced with professor Lilly Barnes’s collectivist “Safe-Think” and other classes that promote intellectual unanimity and emotional awareness of hurtful and offensive speech, all of which should lead to lower FSI premiums in the future.

According to the official statement, the school administrators are hopeful they will live to see the day when Free Speech Insurance will no longer be required as all students will be properly trained in collectivism and unanimous thinking, providing a safe learning environment for everyone on the UC Berkeley campus.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Portland Community College to devote an entire month to ‘whiteness’-shaming

University of Connecticut creates black-only living space as activist groups brand move towards segregation as ‘troubling’

EDITORS NOTE: The political satire originally appeared on The Peoples Cube. The author is the Kommissar of Viral Infestions, Hero of Change and Prophet of the Future Truth.

UC Berkeley student’s article on Islam pulled over fears for her safety

June 13, 2015/in Culture War, National Security, Religion/by Jihad Watch

I saw the piece when it first went up in the Berkeley student newspaper, marveled that it was published at all in such a place, and had planned to post an excerpt at Jihad Watch, but it was gone before I got a chance. Now we know why: there are concerns for the safety of the student who wrote it, and such concerns are entirely reasonable, given the fact (however often denied by dishonest Islamic apologists in the U.S.) of Islam’s death penalty for apostasy. The article was also noteworthy for the author’s frank admission that “yes, Islam does allow men to have four wives and sex slaves” — truths also often denied by Western Islamic apologists. In any case, “free speech” Berkeley ought to be in an uproar over the fact that this student is under threat, and the student paper ought to be filled with avowals of her human rights and declarations of how she must and will be protected. However, Berkeley ain’t what it used to be, if it ever was.

Terrorism Works, part 924,103: “Student’s Anti-Islam Article Retracted Due To ‘Safety’ Risk,” by Austin Petersen, Libertarian Republic, June 8, 2015:

An opinion piece written by a student at the University of California-Berkeley explaining her decision to leave Islam has been pulled from the school newspaper’s website over fears for the author’s safety.

The opinion piece, titled “On Leaving Islam,” recounted the personal story of the narrator (whose name we will withold) growing up a devout (though moderate) Muslim in Pakistan, but later abandoning the faith as she learned more about the world.

“If someone had told me six years ago that I would leave Islam and end up an atheist, I would never have believed him,” the author writes to open the piece. “But now, as a Muslim apostate and atheist, my journey couldn’t have led me any further from what I once knew to be true.”

According to the author, her departure from the faith was driven substantially by her inability to reconcile it with her increasingly liberal personal beliefs.

“I never accepted the male superiority and traditional gender roles that were part of my society,” she says. “For most of my teen years, I felt torn apart by my contradictory beliefs. On one hand, I was a radical feminist who supported gay rights. But on the other hand, I was a practicing Muslim whose religion was clearly homophobic and placed men above women.”

The author made several attempts to find a way to couple Islam with her personal beliefs, but ultimately it was not to be.

“After trying to understand Islam through a plurality of perspectives — orthodox, feminist, Sufi and liberal approaches — I decided to leave Islam, but by that point, I had realized that I didn’t need to look at things as black and white. I could leave Islam without dismissing it or labeling it as wrong,” the author said.

While the author’s rejection of Islam is in far less harsh terms than those used by other apostates, such as Ayaan Hirsh [sic] Ali, her willingness to state her beliefs has apparently still exposed her to a backlash. A few days after the article was posted, it was taken down and replaced by a note from Californian editor-in-chief Kimberly Veklerov that reads “This opinion blog has been retracted because of personal safety concerns.”

The precise nature of these safety concerns, and whether they arose in reaction to direct threats levied against the author, is not clear. The Daily Caller News Foundations reached out to both the author and Veklerov for further details, but only Veklerov replied and she declined to comment.

There is an element of irony that the author should be so imperiled by writing the article, because it has a moderate tone and offers substantial praise for the Muslim world.

“Islam is still extremely misrepresented and shrouded with stereotypes,” the author writes. “I want to address these stereotypes and portray Islam in all its diversity. I’ve experienced the religion firsthand and have also viewed it as an objective bystander… I want to share what I’ve learned about Islam over the years. I plan to defend it and give credit where it’s due — Islam, after all, gave women the right to work and own property back in the seventh century — and I also plan to ruthlessly point out areas that need reform (yes, Islam does allow men to have four wives and sex slaves).”…

The full text of the article, without the author’s name, can be read here.