Palm Springs Will Remove ‘Racist Trees’ Separating Black Neighborhood from Golf Course
The city of Palm Springs, California, announced that it would remove a row of trees blocking a black neighborhood from viewing a municipal golf course.
Palm Springs Mayor Robert Moon and other city officials told residents Sunday they would be removing the line of trees and a chain link fence separating the properties after residents said the trees kept property values in the predominantly black neighborhood down, the Desert Sunreports.
Residents in the area say the trees were planted there in the 1960s as a form of racism — because the invasive tamarisk trees blocked views of the golf course and the San Jacinto mountains, keeping property values low so black families could not make money on their property.
We want in your “HOODS” Damit!
City manager David Ready warned that the tree removal would not happen right away because the full city council would have to vote on the issue. He added that the trees would be down in three months.
The city estimates that the tree removal would cost $169,000.
I bet you any kind of money your tax dollars are paying for this
University teaches white employees how to overcome the ‘discomfort’ of being white
University of Michigan training session used ‘Privileged Identity Exploration Model’
A two-day professional development conference held recently at the University of Michigan included a training session that aimed to help white employees deal with their “whiteness” so they could become better equipped to fight for social justice causes, according to organizers.
Participants who took part in the “Conversations on Whiteness” session, held December 5 during the university’s Student Life Professional Development Conference, were taught to “recognize the difficulties they face when talking about social justice issues related to their White identity, explore this discomfort, and devise ways to work through it,” the university’s website states.
The goal was to help participants in “unpacking Whiteness” to support students and staff with issues and efforts “related to identity and social justice,” the website added.
The “Conversations on Whiteness” session was one of more than a dozen workshops offered at the conference, held Dec. 4 and 5. The whiteness session utilized the “Privileged Identity Exploration Model” to help white participants explore the “discomfort” of their “white identity,” according to organizers.
First introduced in 2007 by University of Iowa professor Sherry Watt in a College Student Affairs Journal article, the model purports to be a method for understanding how people react to stimuli that alert them of the privilege they hold. The model is to be used by “facilitators” to “engage participants in discussions about diversity,” according to Watt.
Watt states there are eight defenses people use to avoid recognizing their privilege. Examples of defenses include “denial,” where someone simply refuses to admit their privilege, and “minimization,” where someone trivializes the impact of their privilege.
The College Fix reached out for comment to the three university staff members listed as facilitators of the event: Abby Priehs: associate director of residence education; Steve Bodei: associate director of Student Life Leadership Education; and Nick Smith: director of campus involvement.
When asked why the “unpacking Whiteness” event was created, and whether or not students at the University of Michigan had complained about the quality of racial discourse on campus, Smith responded: “This is an internal training for U-M Student Life staff.” A subsequent query to Smith was not returned.
Neither Priehs nor Bodei responded to phone calls from The Fix on Monday night.
The Student Life Professional Development Conference was based around the overall theme of “Identity, Wellness, & Work: Healthier, Happier, & More Efficient,” according to the University of Michigan’s student life website.
Additional sessions were titled “Building and Strengthening Your Assessment Muscles,” “Empower, Safety and You,” and “Making Meaning: the Role of Spirituality in Higher Education.”
Another session, titled “I Don’t Feel Safe Talking About Race,” was devoted to giving staff “tools to create a safer climate to promote dialogue around racial issues.” Meanwhile “The Intersection of Well-being, and Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion on Campus” workshop aimed to help Student Life staff “work towards wellness justice for all students on campus.”
The University of Michigan is not alone in holding trainings to help staff cope with “intersecting identities.”
American University hosted a training event earlier this year designed to help staff understand their own identities.
Among the research guides available online from the University of San Francisco, meanwhile, is a “White Privilege Resource Guide” that provides resources to help researchers deal with their various forms of privilege.
Now that’s a full damned goon right there. Damn she’s a goon. Nothing but attitude.
Evergreen professor who made anti-white comments resigns, gets $240G settlement
An Evergreen State College professor who was captured on video harassing her white co-workers resigned after reaching a financial settlement with the college.
Naima Lowe, a self-described black queer artist and educator who taught video and performance art at Evergreen State, received $240,000 from the college after she filed a discrimination and hostile work environment claim, according to college spokesperson Zach Powers.
Lowe has been on personal leave since the beginning of the school year after she claimed she was the victim of “online attacks on her,” according to a letter sent to colleagues. She officially resigned Dec. 6.
Lowe came under fire after she was caught on video berating her white co-workers.
“You are now these motherf***ers that we’re pushing against,” Lowe told her co-workers on the school’s Equity Council in a viral video earlier this year. “You can’t see your way out of your own *ss…This sh** is literally going to kill me.”
In a 2015 video that recently surfaced, Lowe is again heard making racist comments toward white people, the Campus Reform reported.
“White supremacy…lives and breathes within every single white person standing here right now,” Lowe said. “I refuse to shut my mouth and let white people set this agenda…the white gays, the white middle class assimilationist motherf***ing gays, took over the [gay] movement with their assimilationist goals.”
There has been at least five high-profile Evergreen employees who have resigned since last spring following a series of protest at the college relating to accusations of racism and intolerance, according to The Olympian, a local website. Rashida Love, director of the college’s First People’s Multicultural Advising Services program, also resigned last month due to online threats.
Racial tension at the Washington state college was heightened when a professor, Bret Weinstein, who has since resigned, was targeted by a mob of students after he took issue with a demand for a “day of absence” where all white people were asked to leave the campus for a day. The student mob shut down the campus for several days and accused Weinstein of being a racist. At the time, Weinstein had to be escorted out of the campus for fear of his life.
Weinstein and his wife, Heather Heying, a fellow Evergreen professor, filed a $3.85 million tort claim in July claiming Evergreen failed to “protect its employees from repeated provocative and corrosive verbal and written hostility based on race, as well as threats of physical violence.” They resigned in September as part of a $450,000 settlement with the college.
Stacy Brown, the chief of Police Services at the college, resigned after she was also targeted by protesters who alleged institutional racism.
On Sunday afternoon, when Elmer T. Williams’s wife told him that a mass shooting had taken place at a church in Texas, he leapt into action. First, he skimmed a handful of news stories about the massacre. Then, when he felt sufficiently informed, he went into his home video studio, put on his trademark aviator sunglasses, and hit record.
Roughly an hour later, Mr. Williams, 51, a popular right-wing YouTube personality who calls himself “The Doctor of Common Sense,” had filmed, edited and uploaded a three-minute monologue about the Sutherland Springs church shooting to his YouTube page, which had roughly 90,000 subscribers. Authorities had not yet named a suspect, but that didn’t deter Mr. Williams, who is black, from speculating that the gunman was probably “either a Muslim or black.”
Later, after the shooter was identified as a white man named Devin P. Kelley, Mr. Williams posted a follow-up video. He claimed that Mr. Kelley was most likely a Bernie Sanders supporter associated with antifa — a left-wing anti-fascist group — who may have converted to Islam. Despite having no evidence for those claims, Mr. Williams argued them passionately, saying that photos of Mr. Kelley circulating online suggested that he was a violent liberal.
“Sometimes, you can tell a lot from a person’s picture,” Mr. Williams said.
I came across Mr. Williams’s videos several hours after the massacre, when one of them appeared prominently in YouTube’s search results about the shooting, alongside other videos making unverified claims that had been posted by pages with names like TruthNews Network and The Patriotic Beast.
YouTube has long been a haven for slapdash political punditry, but in recent months, a certain type of hyper-prolific conspiracist has emerged as a dominant force. By reacting quickly and voluminously to breaking news, these rapid-response pundits — the YouTube equivalent of talk radio shock-jocks — have successfully climbed the site’s search results, and exposed legions of viewers to their far-fetched theories.
In a phone interview from his home in Houston, Mr. Williams told me that he had created more than 10,000 YouTube videos over an eight-year period, posting as many as 20 monologues per day, and racking up estimated 200 million views.
His hit productions have included fact-challenged videos like “Barack and Michelle Obama Both Come Out The Closet,” which garnered 1.6 million views, and “Hillary Clinton Is On Crack Cocaine,” which had 665,000. He was admitted to YouTube’s partner program, which allows popular posters to earn money by displaying ads on certain types of videos, and claims to have made as much as $10,000 a month from his channel.
“I like to call myself a reporter who reports the news for the common person,” Mr. Williams said.
Whether motivated by profit or micro-celebrity, the success of sensationalists like Mr. Williams has become a vexing problem for companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, which owns YouTube.
These companies sort and prioritize information for their users, and most have built ranking systems that boost news from mainstream outlets over stories from less credible sources. But those algorithms can be gamed in breaking news situations by users who work fast, uploading their videos in the valuable minutes between when news breaks and when the first wave of legitimate articles and videos appears.
“Before reliable sources put up stories, it’s a bit of a free-for-all,” said Karen North, a professor studying social media at the University of Southern California. “People who are in the business of posting sensationalized opinions about the news have learned that the sooner they put up their materials, the more likely their content will be found by an audience.”
Elmer T. Williams said he had created more than 10,000 YouTube videos, posting as many as 20 monologues per day on hot-button topics.
The phenomenon is not limited to YouTube. After last month’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, a Facebook safety check page featured a story from a site called “Alt-Right News” that made false statements about the gunman, and Google’s search results displayed a conspiracy theory from 4Chan, the notoriously toxic message board. After last month’s terrorist attack in New York City, a trending topic page on Twitter briefly featured a story from Infowars, a conservative site that is popular among the conspiracy-minded.
Conservatives have argued that YouTube unfairly targets their videos while allowing liberal channels, such as The Young Turks, to post heated political commentary. And some dispute that there is any conscious gaming going on.
“There is absolutely no strategy,” said Paul Joseph Watson, an editor-at-large at Infowars and a popular YouTube personality who has 1.1 million subscribers. On the day of the Texas church shooting, one of Mr. Watson’s tweets appeared as a result in Google searches for the shooter’s name, although it has since disappeared.
Tech companies, already under fire for the ease with which they allowed Russia to interfere in last year’s election, have also vowed to take a harder stance on domestic misinformation. Twitter’s acting general counsel, Sean Edgett, told congressional investigators last week that the company would take steps to keep false stories from being featured on trending topic pages.
“It’s a bad user experience, and we don’t want to be known as a platform for that,” Mr. Edgett said.
YouTube, whose community guidelines prohibit hateful and threatening content, has begun using artificial intelligence to help identify offensive videos. But conspiracy theories don’t announce themselves, and machines can’t yet handle the complicated business of fact-checking.
In Mr. Williams’s case, human intervention seems to have been necessary. On Tuesday, shortly after I asked YouTube some questions about Mr. Williams’s account, all of his videos disappeared, and his profile was replaced by a message saying, “This account has been terminated due to multiple or severe violations of YouTube’s policy prohibiting hate speech.”
Mr. Williams, who said he had recently left his job as an operations manager at a hazardous materials plant to focus on full-time punditry, has tangled with YouTube’s hate speech policies before. The company shut down one of his previous accounts for similar infractions, which he claimed cost him 250,000 subscribers and a lucrative income stream.
“If YouTube didn’t punish me,” Mr. Williams said, “I could easily be making over $30,000 a month.”
In a statement, YouTube said that Mr. Williams’s account was banned “as soon as it was flagged to us,” because its terms of service prohibit repeat rule-breakers from opening new accounts. It also said that its terms prohibit advertising from appearing on videos featuring “controversial and sensitive events, tragedies, political conflicts, and other sensitive topics.”
Even before this week’s crackdown, Mr. Williams was branching out. He sells cellphone ringtones on his website, and was considering starting his own paid streaming service. Tuesday night, just hours after he was banned by YouTube, Mr. Williams posted a video on Vimeo, another video-hosting platform. He pledged to keep insulting his favorite targets — Democrats, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama — and not shy away from controversy, no matter what the policies said.
“I don’t want to be on YouTube anymore,” Mr. Williams said. “It’s too communist.”
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A workshop at Harvard University on Tuesday night delved into the ins and outs of anal sex, with a presenter denouncing the “stupidity of abstinence” and the joys of “putting things in your butt,” according to a College Fix reporter who attended the event.
The workshop was held as part of the Ivy League university’s Sex Week, which launched Monday and runs through Nov. 12. Titled “What What in the Butt: Anal 101,” the event drew nearly 50 students.
At one point the presenter leading the workshop passed out gloves and butt plugs to students as she offered instructions on anal relaxation techniques.
“Remember it’s all about practice, practice, practice,” said the presenter, Natasha, a representative of the Cambridge-based adult shop Good Vibrations.
Showing students a special medical-grade butt plug, she said “a local guy named Greg makes these—salt of the Earth!”
Identifying the event with the sexual positivity movement, Natasha said the goal was to “encourage people to go after their desires and not feel shame.”
“Come up front guys, were gonna have some dirty fun,” she said as the presentation began.
Noting “not all men have penises, not all women have vaginas,” she added “the butthole is the great sexual equalizer. All humans have a butthole.”
A slide shown during the event listed other perks: “because it feels good,” “tantalizing taboo” and “increases truth/intimacy.”
The crowd appeared enthusiastic, asking detailed questions about anal intercourse. One guy even showed up in a hotdog costume.
“There are two types of people in this world, people who watch anal porn and dirty fucking liars,” Natasha told students.
She said she blames politics and religion for preventing young people from enjoying anal sex.
“You couldn’t be fucked in the ass in Texas until about 10 minutes ago,” she said.
Natasha also denounced abstinence, saying “it doesn’t make any fucking sense” and that “the population of priests and nuns are declining.”
During the event, Natasha went over relaxation and tickling techniques. She also delved into how different actions stimulate the anatomy and how to avoid messy situations. At one point she held up anal beads and explained how to use them. She also discussed how porn gives inaccurate perceptions of sex.
The event closed with a raffle for expensive sex toys, including butt plugs and vibrators. The butt plugs used during the demonstration were handed back to organizers.
Students were also allowed to take whatever they wanted from a bountiful amount of male and female condoms, sex toy cleaners, and literature from Planned Parenthood.
Anal 101 is one of a number of events as part of Harvard’s student organized sex week observance. Other events later in the week include “Beyond the Hub: Broadening Your Porn Horizons” and “Unleashed: Kink 101.”
Tuesday’s event was not the first time Harvard has hosted an anal sex workshop. It also did in 2014, The College Fix reported at the time.
Current members of Harvard’s student sexual education group, Sexual Health Education and Advocacy Throughout Harvard, or SHEATH, which organizes Sex Week, lobbied to bring it back.
Would Someone Tell This Idiot That Socialism Has Always Failed!
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the runner-up for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 2016, told an audience on CNN Wednesday night that Americans would be happy to pay more in federal income taxes if he could just explain to them it would mean they’ll get more “free” government benefits, including health care, child care and college.
In a televised debate against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Sanders told the audience the American people would support his economic vision if only he were able to explain it to them.
“If we can explain to people, ‘Yeah, you’re going to be paying more in taxes. It’s going to be a progressive tax system,’” Sanders told the crowd, “‘The wealthy are going to pay their fair share, not the middle class, not the working class, but everybody will pay some more. But you’re gonna get free health care, and maybe you’re gonna get free child care, and maybe your kids are gonna be able to go to college tuition-free. You know what? You’re gonna better off than under Ted’s system.’”
Sanders recently introduced a Medicare For All bill to extend the government-run health insurance program for the elderly and disabled to all Americans. His bill, which has garnered support from one third of the Democrats in the U.S. Senate, would extend benefits not only to all Americans, but to illegal aliens as well.
At one point the presenter leading the workshop passed out gloves and butt plugs to students as she offered instructions on anal relaxation techniques.