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[Snowman Prophet of Doom]

The professor has stated repeatedly, including in the initial video, that he "doesn't care about debate", only "dialectic" in the sense of discussion leading to a comprehension of greater truth for those involved. My guess re: Tucker Carlson is that he's basically an "I'll talk to anybody who'll listen" type, which one can dispute as bad judgment (I wouldn't, since Fox News, disgusting though it be, isn't really the home of the "alt right" types who call in death threats - that's more the purview of Twitter (where I watched this blow up pretty much in real time), the chans, Breitbart, and other such websites - but of "old fucks who hate liberals because some hippie spit on their buddy when he came home from Vietnam" types) but is hardly some grand crime for which he's deserving of losing his job. This blew up because conservatives fucking hate how liberal colleges generally are, so any time college students behave in obviously stupid, reactionary, unjust ways, they blow it the hell up to energize their base and demoralize people, like that girl in the Vice video, who are basically decent but not necessarily on board with shouting and professors or sitting in a circle and snapping because somebody said some generic Tumblrified catchphrase.

The students in that Vice video are fucking assholes, btw. I'll take a Bret Weinstein on my side over any of them any day of the week.

 

[Dyle]

That Vice video is good, but it seriously needed to be longer. It doesn't even mention in passing the many events over the school year that left the students feeling unsafe and doesn't describe what the Day of Absence was about and why its new form this year became so controversial. They also really should have listed the number of times the school has gone on lockdown to highlight how the campus has been attacked, not only from within, but from legitimate white supremacists from beyond the campus community who have been drawn into the controversy. Without that information, I'm not sure if it effectively conveyed the legitimate concerns of the students alongside their ill-conceived character assassination.

This video just reminds me of how everyone has ended up looking like caricatures of themselves in the the narrative that's formed around whatever actually happened at Evergreen.

- Pink haired girl uses "white cis-hetero male" like it's slur and talks about "weeding out" intellectual opponents. Fellow students essentially say that free speech is bullshit. Crowds being incredibly verbally agressive towards Weinstein and other faculty.

- Weinstein, for no particularly good reason, and despite being a progressive, goes on Tucker Carlson. Tucker motherfucker Carlson. On a piece that he must have known would aim a metaphorical sledgehammer straight at his rather diverse student body and rile upp all sorts of unsavory people. I mean I understand the guy was basically under siege, but goddamn, he must have known that this was a spectularly bad judgement call.

- The principal being so out of sorts and out of control that he can't even bring himself to say that he isn't a white supremacist with any confidence. He just looks like he's abdicating his leadership role and abandoning the campus to mob rule. He doesn't pick a side, and he also refuses to stand up for himself. Comes off as completely spineless.

I don't know what to think about this anymore beyond that it's a clusterfuck, and that the people at Evergreen are the ones paying for it, fair or not.

This is where I'm at now, everyone involved in this situation has legitimate points and has seriously misjudged how those points would be taken. If calmer heads had prevailed from the beginning, this never would have escalated to all-out war.

Weinstein screwed up in two ways, first by pushing a somewhat intellectually dishonest argument about a campus event to which it didn't really apply. The off-campus events that white students were encouraged to attend could only handle 200 students at a college of 4,000, and playing devils advocate at a time when minority students felt they were under attack is uniformed at best. And obviously by going on Tucker Carlson, as that ended up being the spark that turned this into a national news story and attracted alt-right provocateurs to the campus.

The students completely fucked up almost everything in their protests, even though their concerns for their safety were completely justified. To be fair though, the students in the Vice video saying "free speech is bullshit" are doing so right after talking about death threats, which some of them have received, so they should get a partial pass on that.

The principal comes off in the interview as out of touch because he literally says that he didn't ask the protesting students why they were sieging him in his office. Basically we've tried nothing but we're out of ideas