After Losing on Kavanaugh, Art Students Demand Campus Make Permanent Changes
It probably shouldn’t shock anyone with access to social media that Democrats are unusually uncivil after the Kavanaugh confirmation. Not that there was a surfeit of civility before then, mind you, but this time, they swear, they’re really, really serious about it.
I can’t post too many of the reactions here; even on (especially on) blue-checkmarked accounts. They usually involved carpet-bombing using ordnance of the F-word variety, combined with threats to never let Republicans back into society (or at least until they’ve undergone state-sponsored deprogramming of some sort).
This is one of the tamer manifestations of delusion, courtesy of Jerry Saltz — senior art critic for New York magazine.
Come gather round people wherever you roam & shun any republican family member you have. Until this president is gone. You don’t need to tell that family member that you are shunning them. Just stand up for your country very close to home. Make it hurt for both of you. Rise. Rise
— Jerry Saltz (@jerrysaltz) October 7, 2018
When one Twitter user pointed out Saltz had a “shriveled little heart of hate and animosity,” noting that his own family had always disagreed about politics but found a way to love one another, Saltz took aim at the user’s “fake hating resentful daddy-issue rageful heart too, dear. Block me. You are minority-rule unAmerican nativist.”
That, mind you, is one of the less sulfurous reactions — one that wasn’t brought to you by the letters C and F. And it wasn’t just Kavanaugh who provoked this reaction, either. Any bearer of a Y chromosome who didn’t give in to mobocracy or had ever been accused of sexual impropriety or misogyny of the faintest sort was also in the crosshairs.
Which is how we get to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and anti-Kavanaugh students at the Savannah College of Art and Design.
According to McClatchy, a petition started by a former student at the Georgia art school is demanding that Thomas’ name be taken off of a building at the college. The three-story building is home to the Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation. (The justice was born near the Georgia city in 1948.)
“I don’t want any other female who has hopes and dreams to have to walk through the doors of that building. They shouldn’t have to be subjugated to that toxic feeling,” Sage Lucero, the recent graduate who organized the “Take A Sexual Predator’s Name Off of SCAD’s Building” petition on Change.org, told WJCL.
Imagine how the distaff gender must have felt taking White House tours between January of 1993 and January of 2001. I don’t remember hearing much complaint about that from opponents of Justice Thomas at the time, however.
“In the four years I attended Savannah College of Art and Design , I wasn’t aware there was in fact a building named after Clarence Thomas until it was brought to my attention due to the recent occurrences in the Supreme Court involving Dr. Ford and Brett Kavanaugh,” the petition reads.
“The case between Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill in 1991 was extremely similar to what is happening to Dr. Ford today … The same situation is happening before our eyes today with Dr. Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. When will we learn that a victim’s trauma should outweigh politics? For women like Dr. Ford, and Anita Hill to come forward and speak out about what happened to them is extremely traumatic. For someone to not believe a victim who remembers sheer details such as laughter and has gone through therapy because of it is honestly disgraceful.”
You may notice what doesn’t appear anywhere in this digital rending of garments and gnashing of teeth: Any talk about whether or not Kavanaugh or Thomas actually did what they were accused of doing.
That’s apparently immaterial. So long as someone makes an accusation (and the accused is insufficiently progressive), neither corroboration nor evidence matters. In fact, Lucero makes that clear: “It’s utterly disgraceful to me that I attended a school where a building was named after a sexual predator. And not just any sexual predator, one who wrongfully won against a woman’s word.” (emphasis added.)
That’s right, evidence is completely extraneous when a woman’s word is involved. It shouldn’t be considered when looking at the cases of Justice Kavanaugh or Justice Thomas — or the case of Emmett Till, if you want to extend this argument to its logical conclusion.
As for the university, its officials simply say they “are aware of the petition and have reached out to the sponsor,” according to WSAV-TV. That means we don’t know whether or not Thomas’ name will be stripped from the edifice or whether it will be named after Anita Hill, as Lucero is demanding.
Lucero, for her part, gave an illuminating quote about the fact that many students weren’t even aware that a building on the college campus was named after Thomas.
“I just think it’s a great coincidence that it’s coming out right now, for me at least, and making sure everyone else realizes it,” Lucero said.
It is, indeed, “a great coincidence that it’s coming out right now.”
We’re living in the age where rage, insufficient liberalism and politics make someone automatically guilty based on mere accusation. The left has moved beyond mere liberalism and embraced a system of political targeting founded upon the nightmarish visions of Franz Kafka.
Those on the sidelines who don’t fall neatly into the new order must be discarded — be they family, friends or otherwise — and ostracized with invective and vulgarity of the lowest sort.
This isn’t the worst thing we’ve seen over the past few weeks, mind you. However, if this strain of thought isn’t effectively countered, this will be the death of proper due process anywhere outside of a court of law.
And you oughtn’t doubt they’ll come for that, too. After all, anyone who cares about something as antiquated as innocence until guilt is proven must be a “minority-rule unAmerican nativist.”
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