“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon,” counseled leftist icon Saul Alinsky. “It’s hard to counterattack ridicule, and it infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage.” This advice might’ve been vindicated by the recent behavior of some politically correct university researchers who reacted to student mockery of their “gender” survey by going into full-melting-snowflake mode.
As the Washington Examiner reports:
A team of woke researchers at Oregon State University [OSU] is crying “fascism” after they appeared to break mentally when students mocked their identity survey with responses like “ethnic gift card” and “attack helicopter.”
The aggravated academics cried out that “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science,” according to a report citing the researchers’ findings in the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies.
They were shocked when they were inundated with mockery and sarcasm after they attempted to research the nature of the undergraduate LGBT community within the STEM fields, according to the researchers.
At least 50 of the 349 responses they received had “slurs, hate speech, or direct targeting of the research team.”
Students who sent these in were deemed “malicious respondents,” and the woke researchers harnessed their hurt feelings to change their study and look into how these responses “relate to engineering culture by framing them within larger social contexts — namely, the rise of online fascism.”
In the end, they produced a work titled “Attack Helicopters and White Supremacy: Interpreting Malicious Responses to an Online Questionnaire about Transgender Undergraduate Engineering and Computer Science Student Experiences,” according to the report.
Actually, perhaps a more beneficial study would be: An Analysis of Whether Any Extant Group Has Thinner Skin Than “Gender” Researchers.
This said, bizarre researchers, and perverse research, are hardly unprecedented. After all, some WWII-era Nazis tried to prove that the Germans were originally inhabitants of Atlantis and descended from a race of supermen who lost their great powers due to interbreeding. Then there were the Soviets and their “Research Institute of The Brain of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences”; its mission was to study the deceased Vladimir Lenin’s brain, because, the thinking went, he was such an incredible man that there just must have been something special about it.
Speaking of odd gray matter, there’s more to the OSU researchers’ story. As the New York Post writes, their
paper broke the [students’] responses down into themes like demographics, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), gender, “anti-trans, anti-queer,” racism, antisemitism, and “online hate subculture references.” Several answers contained profanity and other offensive and obscene language and many referenced memes.
According to the article, when the “malicious” subjects were asked to fill out demographic data, “12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft” ranging from an “Apache Attack Helicopter” to a “V22 osprey.”
In the section declaring one’s disabilities, responses ranged from claiming to be “illiterate” to lamenting “My country is run by communists,” or even declaring that identifying as transgender is a disability in itself due to “the inability to come to terms with biological reality.”
One respondent claimed to identify as a gift card as their gender.
Under racial and ethnic identities they said, “I’m an ethnic gift card,” and for disability, the answer was “I don’t have enough gift cards.”
Other responses to questions about identity rejected the researchers’ project entirely, with answers such as “My skin color is not important,” “Come on man, these questions are stupid. Everyone is a grab bag of genetics from all over the world,” and “What else do you want to know? What I ate for breakfast….”
“Online memes associated with white nationalist and fascist movements were present throughout the data, alongside memes and content referencing gaming and ‘nerd’ culture,” the researchers further claimed.
This all was, apparently, very, very traumatic and induced quite the hissy fit. As the Daily Caller relates:
Researchers claim that the “malicious” responses had a negative impact on the mental health of some members of their cohort. The research team pointed out that one transgender researcher felt particularly hurt by the responses, as they had already been in therapy over “online anti-trans rhetoric.”
The research team concluded that fascism had become popular among engineering and computer science students. In response, the researchers suggested a “social justice STEM education” to educate students on online radicalization and “anti-colonial, intersectional solidarity.”
“The university at its most ideal can be envisioned as ‘a central site for revolutionary struggle, a site where we can work to educate for critical consciousness’ using ‘a pedagogy of liberation,” the team reportedly wrote.
In other words, the researchers’ current problems stem from STEM — and the STEM needs a flower. Whether they’ll get the requisite sunlight and water for it, though, is a different matter. For the “team’s research reportedly faced rejection from many scientific journals,” the Caller later added, “leading them to conclude that anti-fascist research in academia is considered ‘irrelevant to engineering education, if not alarmist.’” Pity that.
Perhaps the researchers’ mistake was surveying STEM students and not “gender” studies majors. After all, the former generally are men, who are less likely than women to follow fashions and are more likely to rebel and use mockery. STEM undergraduates also tend to have relatively high IQs. So, suffice it to say, the OSU social(ist) scientists forgot who their market was every bit as much as Bud Light did.
All this said, people unabashedly fighting for “revolutionary struggle” — Marxist language — are dangerous no matter how ridiculous they appear. Remember that the Nazis’ and Soviets’ ridiculousness didn’t stop them from ridiculously staining the ground red with more than 100 million dead bodies.
