Just when you think college activists can’t get nuttier.
Students entering a building at Gustavus Adolphus College recently were horrified to see posters proclaiming that “America is a white nation,” and urging whites to report “any and all illegal aliens to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
Naturally, alert witnesses and their acquaintance took immediate action. While some deployed the “F” word in multiple venues, others reported the unspeakable printed material to the proper authorities:
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Many Gustavus students and alumni reacted angrily to the white nationalist signage, with some inquiring “what the f**k” in disbelief, others calling it “disgusting,” and one succinctly stating “F**k. That.”
One alumna even posted on Facebook that her cousin had discovered the signs at Beck Academic Hall and reported it to the school’s Bias Response Team, remarking that “it isn’t much of a surprise something like this was posted” at that particular building.
The Dean of Students responded with gratifying promptness, commending the cousin who reported the posters for being a bystander of surpassing excellence.
Your action as a bystander demonstrates that Gustavus students care about each other and their collegiate environment and are willing to take a stand against hate and bias.
But even the academic family at Gustavus Adolphus, which is apparently used to taking a stand against bias and hate, freaked out a little over what else the dean disclosed.
The posters weren’t put up by “white nationalists” at all. They were put up by a consortium of student groups seeking to “educate [their] peers and campus community about issues of bias, and the importance of being an active bystander.”
The Facebook poster explained:
[A] friend of hers, who had also filed a complaint with the school’s Bias Response Team, had received a response from Dean of Students Jones VanHecke explaining that the offensive flyers were actually “part of a series of educational ‘invisible theater’ events taking place this week that have been planned by I Am We Are theater troupe, the Diversity Leadership Team, and the Bystander Intervention Committee.”
Now, they had me at “Bystander Intervention Committee.” A theater troupe could be called anything, and often is, but every school worth its salt has one. A Bystander Intervention Committee? Genius. I’m just saying.
At any rate, quite a few students and alumni were…annoyed. This little shenanigan didn’t go over very well, even if it did give the dean a reason to commend some very fine bystander excellence.
Exit points: first, part of the annoyance for people is being treated like trained puppies, asked to perform the Excellent Bystander trick on an artificial pretext, just because some bozo gets a whim up his hairline. What happens when these bozos get in charge?
But here’s the other, more insidious thing. It’s actually the law of the United States of America that it is illegal to be here without proper immigration authority. Most people, in most of the country, make no special effort to report those they suspect of being here illegally to the federal authorities. But that’s not because doing so would be hateful, or an act of “white nationalism,” any more than reporting any other crime is hateful.
Gustavus Adolphus College is spending people’s hard-earned money making sure that the law-abiding perspective is associated in students’ minds with “white nationalism” and “hate.”
And students know you don’t really get to be a bystander to that dynamic of indoctrination. You either affirm the activist proposition, whenever affirmation is demanded of you, or you get ranked with the so-called “haters.” Welcome to history’s cushiest, most elaborate Gulag.
