Free Republic

It seems like, year after year, the number of words we Americans are allowed to say continues to shrink. That trend is particularly evident on college campuses, where almost once a month there’s a newly deemed offensive or non-inclusive word students and faculty are encouraged to avoid. Over the last 12 months The College Fix has chronicled several examples, striving to keep tabs on the ever-expanding list of verboten words and phrases, according to the campus PC police. ================================================================ Low-hanging fruit: At an event led by Elgin Community College’s Multicultural and Global Initiatives Committee, it was explained that the term...

The taxpayer-funded University of Missouri is offering segregated weekly meetings “for students, staff and faculty of color” to discuss “racial identity,” “skills for surviving and resisting hate” and their “experiences as a person of color at a Predominately White Institution.” The University of Missouri’s College of Education sponsors the segregated meetings, which are slated to occur every Friday afternoon in the public school’s Multicultural Center. Students who attend will “process race-related macro and microaggressions” and “heal as a community,” a poster adverting the segregated therapy sessions explains. (RELATED: Christmas Vacation Is The Newest ‘Microaggression’) The Mizzou group is called “Healing...

Members of Tufts University’s Greek system have been told they could face “serious disciplinary sanctions” — including a possible investigation by the campus police — for wearing Halloween costumes that offend peers or make the campus community “feel threatened or unsafe.” The warning was part of a letter to the presidents of fraternities and sororities on campus signed by various Greek Life council leaders, who asked the chapter presidents to relay the message to their members.

A campaign initiated by the National Association for Bilingual Education and the Santa Clara County Office of Education says a teacher who mispronounces a student’s name is causing a negative emotional state that can lead to poor academic success. The campaign, titled “My Name, My Identity: A Declaration of Self,” says on its website, “Did you know that mispronouncing a student’s name negates the identity of the student? This can lead to anxiety and resentment which, in turn, can hinder academic progress.”

To ensure a “fair and impartial” criminal justice system, the U.S. Department of Justice plans to train every one of its law enforcement employees and prosecutors to “recognize and address” their “implicit bias.” […] According to the DOJ news release, “Implicit bias can affect interactions and decisions due to race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion and socio-economic status, as well as other factors. Social science has shown that all individuals experience some form of implicit bias but that the effects of those biases can be countered through training.” […] “At the Department of Justice, we are committed to ensuring that...

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill issued a guide this week which instructs students that Christmas vacations and telling a woman “I love your shoes!” are “microagressions.” The taxpayer-funded guide — entitled “Career corner: Understanding microaggressions” — also identifies golf outings and the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” as microagressions. The UNC Chapel Hill guide, published on Thursday, covers a wide range of menacing microaggressions — which are everyday words that radical leftists have decided to be angry or frustrated about. Christmas vacations are a microagression, the public university pontificates, because “academic calendars and encouraged vacations” which “are organized...

Hypocrisy is one of the most overused words in the English language. Most people think it refers to any failure to act in accordance with one’s expressed beliefs. But that’s simply inaccurate. Failure to live up to one’s beliefs is called being a human. Being a hypocrite is when a person behaves in ways that are inconsistent with his expressed beliefs because he doesn’t actually believe the things he is saying. At the core of true hypocrisy there usually lies one motive: Power. To put it another way, when people tell you things they don’t actually believe, they are usually...

The man who launched a dating website dedicated to helping white people meet each other in a state that is almost entirely white now says the website isn’t racially motivated. Sam Russell founded WhereWhitePeopleMeet.com, in Utah — a state that is more than 90 percent white, according to U.S. Census statistics. The Bountiful man said he got the idea while home sick, watching daytime TV. "It's not racially motivated at all," he told the Salt Lake Tribune on Monday. He said the idea came from other dating websites that help people from other groups meet each other, like BlackPeopleMeet.com, FarmersOnly.com,...

Some college students agree radio stations should stop playing “White Christmas,” because the holiday classic is said to be “a racially-charged micro-aggression.” Media Research Center’s Dan Joseph asked students on a college campus to sign a petition against the song “because the song only focuses on ‘White’ Christmases.” Joseph asks, “We think that the song ‘White Christmas’ is insulting to people of color because it says snow is white and therefore it is good.” “Sounds understandable, makes sense,” one student responds to his plea for a signature. Only one student refused, while another requested more information, according to the video,...

Editor's note: This piece was co-authored by Tim Graham.To look at virtually anything produced by Hollywood is to register confirmation that the libertine left cherishes clogging our popular culture with vulgarities. The messaging in movies, television and particularly music is punctuated deliberately and unnecessarily with all manner of language designed to offend. But when it comes to perfectly decent speech -- spoken innocently with no bad intention -- those same liberals need smelling salts. Welcome to the wacky world of "micro-aggressions," where conversation becomes a minefield of political correctness. It's all the rage on campuses. Both the University of California...

Phrases such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “America is a melting pot" are "micro-aggressions" that could leave some students feeling discriminated against, according to a new faculty training guide put out by the University of California that one former professor in the system says shows "how crazy it's become." The guide, which says those phrases and others can be interpreted by minorities as “denying the significance of a person of color’s racial/ethnic experience and history,” or that they “assimilate to the dominant culture,” is used across the vast, 200,000-student University of California system. Specifically, it is for...

Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at Tuskegee University that was a ringing call for the graduates not to be discouraged by her whining. Much of the first lady’s speech was what is right and proper for a Tuskegee commencement, drawing on the story of the determination and skill of the Tuskegee Airmen. But she devoted a long passage to her own struggles that was off-key and characteristically self-pitying. Few women in modern America have been the focus of as much adulation as Michelle Obama, a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who was making almost $270,000 by the...