The University of Virginia supposedly enrolls the smartest kids in the Old Dominion and from around the country. But the 100 student, faculty and community members who demonstrated yesterday around the Thomas Jefferson statue in front of the Rotunda, were puerile, prone to profanity, and shockingly out of touch with reality.
“One month ago, we stood on the front lines in downtown Charlottesville as all manner of white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and neo-fascists swarmed the area,” said one speaker, according to the Daily Progress. “Two months ago, the Ku Klux Klan rallied in their safe space, fully robed and fully protected by multiple law enforcement agencies who brutalized and tear gassed peaceful counter-protesters.”
The white supremacists had “safe” spaces? The police “brutalized” peaceful counter-protesters? Yeah, right. That’s not exactly what the rest of the world saw on all those video tapes. These demonstrators aren’t just constructing an alternate narrative, they’re constructing an alternate reality.
It’s one thing to be delusional, another thing to be delusional with pretensions to power: While denouncing racism and castigating the United States as “fascist” — “No Trump, No KKK no fascist USA,” went the chant — these cloistered college radicals demonstrated a totalitarian mindset themselves.
What did these anti-fascists want, insofar as their demands could be discerned among placards that said “Fuck Silence” and a mob that chanted, “Shut it down”? One speaker demanded that all students undergo education on “white supremacy, colonization and slavery as they directly relate to Thomas Jefferson, the university and the city of Charlottesville.” Essentially, these little Stalinists wanted to turn UVa into a re-education camp — with them doing the re-educating.
And how did the UVa administration respond to the unauthorized draping of the Jefferson statue with a black cloth? Wrote the Daily Progress: “UVa had not yet responded to request for comment on the Jefferson statue shrouding by press time. No police officers were observed at the statue on Tuesday night.”
Administrators in absentia and nary a policeman in sight. The world’s wimpiest fascist police state.
Elsewhere on “the grounds”… We have this report from Campus Reform that a group of about 20 UVa students tried to shut down a “cops and robbers”-themed fraternity party because the costumes “make a joke of mass incarceration.”
The frat boys wore orange jumpsuit, bandanas, chains, and tattoos drawn on their arms.
“These ‘costumes’ make a joke of mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex, systems that disproportionately brutalize people of color,” Students United complains. “The predominantly white members of this fraternity got to take their costumes off at the end of the night, people trapped in the prison system do not.”
“It’s this kind of willful ignorance that allows white supremacy to continue,” the post states unequivocally. “After a summer of terror and violence instigated by white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, it’s at the very least disappointing that members of the UVA community would so willing to make a joke of systems that kill and brutalize marginalized communities.”
Right, as if there are no white people in prison. It’s all about race. Everything’s all about race, twenty-four/seven, for these people.
Fortunately, the scolds and killjoys seem to represent a tiny minority. Their rallies generate less participation than a one-kegger frat party on Rugby Road. But they can’t be ignored. The leftists seem to be able to intimidate other students into mumbling, apologetic silence. They exercise influence all out of proportion to their numbers.
Update: In a letter to alumni yesterday, University of Virginia President Teresa Sullivan said the protesters were “desecrating ground that many of us consider sacred,” reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. University personnel have removed the shroud. One person was arrested Tuesday for public intoxication.
As long as the protesters didn’t deface the statue, I don’t think that any official reaction is called for. College kids will be college kids, and draping a cloth over Jefferson is no worse than many a college prank. The real issue is the toxic ideology and perpetual outrage the protesters vent. I am divided in my opinion of whether it is best to ignore them in the hope that their rhetoric is so grotesque as to be self-defeating, or to attack them out of the fear that by intimidating others, they might restrict the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.
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