It’s right up there, or down there, with how a British politician got charged with “hate speech” for reading an excerpt from a Winston Churchill book:
A professor at St. John’s University in New York City was recently fired — after a complaint from just one student — for reading a Mark Twain book that lampoons racism.
What was the problem?
The work, Pudd’nhead Wilson, includes the N-word, as part of an authentic relation of the language and dialects of the time and place in which the story is set.
Meanwhile, many secondary schools now expose students to intellectually degraded books containing lewd sexuality and vulgarity. Moreover, CNN retains a contributor who openly admires history’s most notorious racist: Adolf Hitler.
Commentator Andrea Widburg reports on the fired academic, telling us that “Hannah Berliner Fischthal, the daughter of Holocaust-survivors, has taught at St. John’s as an adjunct professor of English for 20 years…. In February, during a remote class, Fischthal was discussing Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson with her students. As noted, above, Twain used the N-word as part of an extended satire poking fun at the ugliness and stupidity of racism.”
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The New York Post then explained what happened next, writing that “‘Mark Twain was one of the first American writers to use actual dialect,’ Fischthal said.” “‘His use of the ‘N-word’ is used only in dialogues as it could have actually been spoken in the south before the Civil War, when the story takes place.’”
“The day after the class, however, she got an email from a student who said she had to ‘abruptly’ leave the call because of Fischthal’s use of an ‘inappropriate slur,’” the paper continued.
The professor then made a common mistake: She apologized. This never saves you because the politically correct mobs aren’t possessed of virtue; they don’t forgive, they flay — especially when detecting weakness.
So Fischthal was next summoned to a March 3 HR meeting to address the Twain reading, “the subsequent discussion of it and a comment she allegedly made about a Black student’s hair,” the Post also informs. “Fischthal said she only made a remark about a student’s head being wrapped up during class and it had nothing to do with her hair.”
“She said she was also criticized for mentioning her family’s experience in the Holocaust during class,” the paper further relates. The outcome?
The professor was suspended March 5 and, after a “bias” investigation, was fired April 29.
But while mentioning a Holocaust experience may now be verboten in leftist circles, Hitler love is apparently a résumé enhancer.
Just consider, for instance, a journalist named Adeel Raja. Over the years, he “has had his byline on 54 stories published at CNN and has been working with CNN as a freelance contributor for almost eight years,” Widburg writes in a different story. “Raja also has a longstanding record of publishing Hitler-worshiping tweets. He’s not shy about his love for the Holocaust, yet CNN keeps going back to him — maybe because a lot of people at CNN agree with him.”
Here are a few of the Islamabad-based Raja’s tweets, posted between early 2014 and late 2020, the period during which the man has his 54 stories published by CNN. (Note: Each box below contains two tweets; scroll down within a box to see the second.)
At least Raja doesn’t mince words. But the worst thing about his tweets, notes Widburg, “is that they fit in so well at CNN.”
Then there’s what fits in well in today’s government schools. While hearing racial terms in a story set in a time in which those terms weren’t a slur is apparently too much for today’s snowflakes, it has emerged that the Loudoun County, Virginia, Public School District (LCPS) has been assigning sexually explicit, vulgar books to high-school freshmen (14- and 15-year-olds). Below is a video of a heated recent local school board meeting in which outraged parents read aloud some of the immoral material.
By the way, the untoward books are part of the schools’ “Diverse text collection.” This may be an appropriate name, ironically, given that “diversity” comes partially from an Old French term that could mean “wickedness” or “perversity.”
What’s so striking, among other things, about the Twain situation is the complete lack of intellectualism displayed. It’s reminiscent of the juvenile controversies over the term “niggardly,” which means cheap. One government employee in Dallas, Texas, actually lost his job in 2008 after a black colleague complained that he used the word during a meeting.
Of course, instead of kowtowing to profound ignorance, the term’s definition could have been politely explained to the complainer, and emphasized could be that a word can sound a bit like an epithet while having no relationship to it at all.
This failure to educate is even worse with Twain in school because at issue are educators and young minds that are supposed to be educated. Emphasizing that certain words meant different things in different times — that, in fact, our distant ancestors had a different culture — would expand children’s thinking, forestall chronological prejudice, and fulfill what academia claims as part of its mandate: teaching respect for different cultures.
This would engender true tolerance directed toward a positive end. Instead, so-called educators pander to youths’ misguided feelings, instilling the notion that their emotions are the ultimate arbiters of reality. This only reinforces whatever narcissistic tendencies may already exist, mind you.
As for the even bigger picture painted by this educational rot and CNN’s Hitler love, it reflects something scarier than any malevolent agenda advanced by Machiavellian puppeteers: our society’s complete inversion of moral reality.
The are many among us today who reality do feel (and that is the operative word) that hearing the N-word used in a story or illustratively is worse than exposing children to prurient and profane material. There also are those who are more put off, on a visceral level, by such usage than by a Muslim Pakistani’s pro-Hitler passions. “He’s oppressed and has a reason to feel as he does,” may be the justification.
It’s what happens when a people loses faith, descends into relativism, and sheds its virtue. Right will be called wrong and wrong, right.
