Bernie Sanders explodes a right-wing myth: ‘Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal’

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said the immigration debate is framed exactly wrong.

Republicans vilify President Barack Obama for supposedly opening the border to ever-increasing multitudes of immigrants, legally or otherwise, but the Democratic presidential candidate said blame is cast in the wrong direction, reported Vox.

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal,” Sanders said in a wide-ranging interview with the website. “That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.”

Sanders frequently targets the libertarian industrialists Charles and David Koch as unhealthy influences on American democracy — but he’s not the first to notice their support for an open borders policy.

The conservative Breitbart and the white supremacist VDARE website each blasted the Koch brothers for sponsoring a “pro-amnesty Buzzfeed event” in 2013, and two writers for the Koch-sponsored Reason — former contributing editor David Weigel and current editor-in-chief Nick Gillespie — have always been supportive of immigration reform.

That’s at odds with what many Republicans believe, and Sanders told Vox that an open border would be disastrous to the American economy.

“It would make everybody in America poorer — you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that,” Sanders said. “If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or (the United Kingdom) or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people.”

He said conservative corporate interests pushed for open borders, not liberals.

“What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy,” Sanders said. “Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour — that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, (and) I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.”

The senator said flooding the job market with foreign candidates willing to work for low pay would be especially harmful to younger Americans trying to enter the workforce.

“You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today?” he said. “If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?”

“I think from a moral responsibility we’ve got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don’t do that by making people in this country even poorer,” Sanders said.

Via: Raw Story

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Black prof thinks white privilege overshadows classroom discussions

Koritha Mitchell, a professor at Ohio State, wrote that white privilege is standard in class syllabi now because faculty are afraid to include reading materials from non-white authors.

Mitchell claims she challenges her students “simply by existing.”

One professor at Ohio State thinks that colleagues who change their materials for fear of offending students are “cowards.”

Koritha Mitchell, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, argued on Vox that her presence as a black, female faculty member, combined with the white privilege her students are bombarded with on a daily basis, causes the classroom community to fear controversial discussions.

"My students, after all, have grown up bombarded with the message that people who belong in authority—especially authority based on intellectual accomplishments and expertise—are men, usually white men."    Tweet This

In her article titled, “I'm a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards,” Mitchell says that her very presence makes students uncomfortable because she does “not fit any picture society has given them of an expert.”

“My students, after all, have grown up bombarded with the message that people who belong in authority—especially authority based on intellectual accomplishments and expertise—are men, usually white men,” she elaborates. “I challenge my students simply by existing.”

According to Mitchell, students also grow up learning that real literature is only written by white authors. However, she claims this learning trend isn’t limited to a certain “identity category.” She alleges that students are made uncomfortable by the presence of even a couple of required readings by authors who are not white. Mitchell said she doesn’t have the luxury of changing her curriculum to make her students more comfortable.

Universities, Mitchell said, treat students as consumers and therefore: “The customer is always right.” That is why she “read[s] about professors being afraid of their own students and changing what they teach in response to that fear.”

Edward Schlosser, the pseudonym of a college professor writing in Vox, said that he had “intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn't just dangerous, it's suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won't upset anybody.”

“Who can most afford to teach in ways that are least likely to inspire controversy?” Mitchell asks. The answer is anyone who is not hurt by dominant ideas: the white heterosexual male perspective dominates all others despite claiming to be neutral, the professor writes.

"Have you ever noticed how, even if standards are changed to accommodate someone, Americans never worry about standards being lowered unless the person getting the opportunity isn't white?" she continues.

Later in her article, Mitchell claims that everyone is taught that a dead black person is not a true societal loss.

“If whiteness inspires sympathy, then those who are not white will most often become targets,” she writes.

“The most influential positions are held primarily by those who are white and male not only because of this country's long history of directing affirmative action toward whites but also because white men continue to insist that their whiteness and maleness has little bearing on their actions,” Mitchell concludes her article. “The more that Americans allow this lie to hold sway, the more the culture of fear will expand.”

Via: Campus Reform

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Shocking at Vox: 'I'm a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me' -

A top article trending on Vox, an exclusively online (and leftward leaning) news platform is entitled "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." According to a professor of a "mid-size state school" who preferred to remain anonymous to protect his job, "The student-teacher dynamic has been re-envisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best.

" Of course for anyone paying a speck of attention to the free speech environments of American campuses, this is nothing new. In 2012, George Will penned an article in The Washington Post entitled "Colleges have free speech on the run." He described, "The right never to be annoyed, a new campus entitlement" and the "Legions of administrators, who now outnumber full-time faculty, are kept busy making students mind their manners, with good manners understood as conformity to liberal politics." 

Meanwhile FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), whose president Greg Lukianoff describes himself as "a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, lifelong Democrat," has been trying to bring the lack of free speech on public and private college campuses to public attention since its founding in 1999. 

But no matter. Now that college intellectual oppression is affecting not only the few conservative professors who dared to enter the polarized world of American academia but also liberal professors, some in the liberal media are prepared to listen. 

The professor described the he fear he held that students would rate him poorly on evaluations or report him for insensitivity to the administration if he assigned readings that "affect the student's emotional state." He pointed to "a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice" that focuses on emotions, as the culprit for turning millennial students into fragile flowers. 

According to the professor, this trend toward ever-increasing censorship "affects liberal, socially conscious teachers much more than conservative ones." It remains unclear how that logic pans out. However, he also believes these conservative professors will be liberal academia's savior from itself, as "there's nothing much to do other than sit on our hands and wait for the ascension of conservative political backlash.

" PS: The Wall Street Journal had the story of students going after liberal prof Laura Kipnis for an essay on "growing sexual paranoia" on campuses.

Via: Newsbusters

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