Where ‘Indigenous Peoples' Day Leads and Other Progressive Plots - Granite Grok

Where ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day Leads and Other Progressive Plots

columbus-820x539I’d like to wish the folks out in the Durham area a Happy ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Durham, New Hampshire, is the first municipality in the Granite State to adopt the second Monday in October as ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day.’

(c/o WMUR)“After much consideration and reflection regarding the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, the town council has come to support this resolution to designate the second Monday in October as ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day,’” said Durham Town Administrator Todd Selig. “Not only is it appropriate to our local history, but also to recognize and value indigenous people everywhere. The designation will encourage residents to learn more about the legacy of Christopher Columbus and the ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ while also recognizing the devastating effects of colonialism on indigenous peoples.”

Durham’s made it an amalgam day, with the European oppressor and the indigenous oppressed sharing billing, but how long do we honestly think that “relationship” is going to last because this feels a lot like progressive incrementalism to me.

Remember when the gay lobby wanted civil unions. Activists, Ray Buckley, even friendly everyman NH governor John lynch all said, just give us civil unions for same-sex couples, and we’ll walk away happy, but then they didn’t walk away. They came back for gay marriage. Anyone who opposed it was labeled a bigot. And when the Democrat majority House rejected it the first time because the people of New Hampshire didn’t want it, they strong-armed a few folks into not voting until they got the vote they wanted.

So Durham’s ‘Indigenous Peoples’ conjoined with Columbus Day is probably the semantic equivalent of civil unions in New Hampshire. And it’s not just Durham. This is a formula for progressive change that I’ve heard mumbled about in several other liberal-ish New Hampshire towns. And I’m betting that the goal is to get rid of Christopher  Columbus altogether, statewide.

But he’s not a Confederate statue or Russian hacker or related to Donald Trump or a Nazi, though he’s probably an off-white supremacist, and Antifa hasn’t figured out a way to shout down Monday holidays they don’t like yet, so this is more like using court cases about contraception rights as a way to get to legalized abortion. You pick at the edge until you can peel it up a bit here and there and then at some point when no one’s looking you just rip the shelf paper off and tada!

However it happens, one fall morning not long from now, that second Monday in October will just be “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.” Calling it anything else will get you cited by the speech police stormtroopers who conjured up the thinking that lead to the bias-free language guide for perpetrating a microaggression or a bias incident.

Speaking of which, not long ago there was a Bias Incident at Dartmouth College. Bias incidents are events where someone applies their bais to something else to declare it a bias incident.

This one occurred in the hallway of Fahey Hall at Dartmouth College and consisted of “racist and sexist graffiti targeting specific members of the community on the hallway’s bulletin board.”

The graffiti was reported to the College through the bias reporting process and removed immediately, so we don’t know what about it was biased or sexist.

West House professor Ryan Hickox and assistant director of residential education for West House Ted Stratton wrote (in an email to all West House residents) that they are “very concerned” about the incident, which they said is a “direct violation” of Dartmouth’s Principles of Community, and do not yet know whether the perpetrator is a member of West House.

The email directed students who are upset as a result of this incident to speak with any of Hickox and Stratton, undergraduate advisors, undergraduate deans, staff in the Office of Pluralism and Leadership…

I’m not clear on who or how many people saw the offending graffiti but you have to wonder if, in such a fragile environment, the email alerting them was enough to drive students to seek out staff or counselors in the office of pluralism and leadership?

Which makes you wonder, what if the email about the bias incident resulted in significantly more micro-aggressed members of the community than the graffiti?

And when you get right down to it will anybody even be at the office of pluralism and leadership? If they’ve got pluralism isn’t picking a leader a potential bias incident? What if no one’s in charge because no one can be? These email-distressed students could show up for counseling only to discover an empty office because the oligarchy couldn’t agree on staffing hours. Hey, I can’t work then or that long it’s against my ism.

Meanwhile, also at Dartmouth College, there is a group called the Action Collective. They held a Resistance Workshop last spring to help facilitate the formation of a sustainable (rather than reactive) community of activists at Dartmouth

Workshops like this are a powerful way of building solidarity and relationships between different activists and activist groups. The event is open to the entire Upper Valley Community, and students from other schools in New Hampshire will be attending as well.

There are four mini-workshops under the umbrella event, and participants will rotate through workshops every 20 minutes.

• Yourself as an Activist – Learn how to support your self and your identity within a movement in order to not burn out, and learn where you fall on the “activist spectrum.” Led by Professor Reena Goldthree.

• Your Movement as a Community – Learn how to build a sustained activist culture and movement. Led by Dartmouth’s Thurgood Marshall Scholar Alphonso Saville.

• Non-Normative (Radical) Approaches to Change – Learn to avoid replicating oppressive structures and institutions within activist communities and movements.

• Campaign Strategy 101 – Learn best practices for campaigning. Led by NextGen Climate Representative Teddy Smyth.

Climate NextGen is one of Liberal Billionaire Tom Steyer’s money funnels to state-level activism, in case you didn’t know.

So I bring up the Action Collective because Dartmouth has their annual bonfire. I don’t know much about it except that it’s something of a big deal and a tradition. The college has been going to great lengths to make it as snowflake friendly as possible because bubble warping feelings aren’t the only priority for higher education – it’s what higher education is all about.

So the Action Collective viewed the bonfire as an opportunity for some sustainable community activism and posted flyers up on campus that read,

To Dartmouth Administration.

Prohibit and condemn language and threats: reporting students to immigration agencies should result in disciplinary actions.

In a post at DartBlog titled “ThePerennially Aggrieved Speak,” the author writes,

Hateful language? How is a judge to define that? Will we have a list of words, phrases, and comments that will be ruled out of order?

And reporting someone who is guilty of breaking the law to the authorities should result in College sanctions? By all means feel free to disagree with a law and seek to change it, but don’t punish people who seek to see it enforced.

All I can say is that I am glad that the members of the Action Collective are not in power. They have a powerful streak of authoritarianism in them.

But they are in power, not as individuals or as a group but as a philosophy about how we should conduct ourselves as a culture. These are the intellectual offspring of a worldview that has bias incidents, microaggressions, free speech zones, safe spaces, and an Office of Pluralism and Leadership where, when they are not counseling aggrieved members of the community they are whispering in the ears of local officials about how great it would be to rename the second Monday in October “Indigenous People’s Day.”

They are the speech police.

If left unchecked or unchallenged there will be a list of words, phrases, even thoughts you’re not allowed to have or express because laws that protect speech and association are like Columbus Day. A rock that you can move if you just get enough people to push it.

The UNH Bias-Free Language guide was created by institutionalized diversity experts. The people who teach the curriculum that facilitates the incremental oppression of open and honest dialogue. And while the bias-free language guide “went away” none of the people or the thinking behind it did. People who are programming the minds of the future leaders of the world.

We are a brief shift in the ideological majority and a line toe or two away from that thinking becoming the statutory standard by which speech is measured. And if you don’t think the Democrat party is sufficiently radical to be on board then explain why they are labeling all of their political opponents as White Supremacists?

Antifa is a militant left-wing group descended from the Redshirts of the 1930’s with a mission to control speech and language that runs contrary to their political goals. To silence any words (thoughts or ideas) with which they disagree. They call everyone to their right, and that’s just about everyone, a Nazi or White Supremacist. It is a blatant intimidation tactic with no basis in proof or fact.

Democrat opposition to this is at best tepid because the attacks, while hyperbolic, are incremental and calculating. Picking at the edges of the shelf paper. Getting a few more people to stop pushing on the other side of that rock.

The Charmian of the New Hampshire Democrat Party, Ray Buckley has publicly labeled country-class voters in the Granite State as White Supremacists. He’s using the same language as masked street thugs to label voting-age residents who might register as Republican to dissuade them from responding to any efforts (that are themselves protected political speech) by the GOP to recruit them.

It’s a form of voter suppression if we’re honest. A poll “tax” of sorts where the price paid is being labeled as a hateful racist bigot if you dare to associate with the wrong party or its platform.

Now, none of these things I’ve mentioned is occurring independently of the other. They are all driven by the same safe spaces philosophy whose function is to propagandize future generations into believing that the only safe place from the mean people and their mean words is the cold embrace of a totalitarian state that decides what people can say or think.

And while the Supreme Court has, so far, consistently protected us from such suppressions we shouldn’t have to rely on small fortunes, years of court cases, and nine unelected lawyers to exercise natural rights protected by the first amendment.

State Legislatures (because Congress is useless) need to consider how or if they can curb such campus level intrusions on constitutional rights, with suitable repercussions.

If we do nothing it’s not just what we call the second Monday in October that will change.

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