We had lunch at a dining hall on the campus of Michigan State University yesterday (living just a couple blocks away, as we do). This was on each table:
You may have thought our world is filled with crises at the moment, but as you can see your tax dollars are preparing students to face the real challenges of life.
If you didn’t know, MSU is the “Spartans”. I shared the above on Twitter and got a good reply from Tina Straighter.
Ah. Much you could say here. To some extent DEI is financial graft. We told people if they tied themselves to a nonsense movement they could gain prestige (however manufactured) and make a lot of money, and by golly plenty of people were fully willing then to pledge their allegiance to a nonsense movement (especially people who sensed they might be doomed in a meritocracy, but have now gotten themselves hired as the some of the highest-ranking officials at universities).
But DEI is also a story about how nature abhors a religious vacuum. Such a vacuum can’t last. Some people in the 20th century probably really had the thought that we could pull this divisive Christian stuff out of the schools, we won’t teach this disputable morality and vice and virtue, we’ll just teach the facts. Well that created a vacuum, and so DEI is filling that vacuum with a brand new, very aggressive and intolerant dogma, very keen to inculcate within students a certain morality, attention to certain virtues and rejection of certain vices, all of them far less rational than the old Christian ones. You expelled rational religion thinking you’d get even more rational secularism out of it, and instead you got irrational religion.
On a related note, from a couple of days ago:
You watch the reaction of some secular Leftists on Twitter to this with some pity, actually. They seem to be genuinely both horrified and confused by what they are seeing (there are many Leftists out there who genuinely despise ethnic hatred, as I said last post), especially in the UK where these crowd have been huge1. They don’t really have the mental apparatus anymore to understand what they are seeing. Many late 20th century atheists expected a 21st century that would just naturally secularize, that was the obvious course humanity was on. It isn’t turning out that way, and their “nothing” is going to find it nearly impossible to oppose “something”. (I do wonder if we’re going to see a small Christian revival in the West out of this, actually.)
I have no idea how many of the people in that crowd are immigrants and how many are native-born. But it did also remind me, when I was in grad school, so maybe around 2008, I attended a talk by Roman Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft. In that talk, referencing the large size of Muslim families, he said that Muslims have discovered a more effective tool than the sword to conquer Europe: the mother.
I guffawed at this photo of the tabletop messaging... can this truly be our reality? When will these shills be lambasted publicly for this ridiculousness? When will we all have the courage (is that even necessary?) to tell people to take a hike over their feelings? We need bumper stickers that say GET OVER YOURSELF. Maybe that’s the costume idea for this year?? Better yet, as a friend recommended, let’s get dressed up as Christian Crusaders and just bring it all to a head in the here and now, even if my inner heathen Hun may have to acknowledge emotional duress.
Some people say that culture in fact is a costume.