Wesley Yang

The council voted to paint over the mural at a cost of $600,000 because it threatens their “safety.”https://twitter.com/ppssfboardwatch/status/1143713451933491200?s=21 …

The destruction of the painting was framed by board members as a form of “reparations”https://twitter.com/toad_spotted/status/1143852458675965959?s=21 …

SF Board member cites White Fragility theory as justification for disregarding intent of painting by Communist in the 1930’s that portrayed Washington as Indian fighter and slave ownerhttps://twitter.com/alimcollins/status/1143922181778264064?s=21 …

The irony of course is that the whole point of left revisionist history of this sort was to show the racist violence intrinsic to America's founding.

But there's a new therapeutic doctrine that has merged with anti-racist progressivism which holds that violent images have the power to induce trauma and must therefore live in a sanitized, expurgated reality.

This is an anti-rational and anti-artistic doctrine that recasts a form of primitive superstition as progress and enlightenment.

But schools of education have trafficked in this form of thinking and it has become the baseline for a generation of educators and administrators.

They are fully immunized against any justification made with reference to the older worldview, and feel that they are acting righteously in eradicating any and all traces of the past that deviate from the new orthodoxy. They cannot be persuaded of the errors of their ways.

This ideology has been around for decades and the cause of countless purges in left-wing spaces. The SF board of education is what happens when Portlandia or the Park Slope Food Co-op control hundreds of million in funding and the schooling of the next generation.

The basic asymmetry we now confront is that the "worst are filled with passionate intensity." Overwhelming majorities of the public find this ridiculous but passively, while the most energetic actors believe this.

Alongside the worst filled with passionate intensity are those who run interference on behalf of a rise of an anti-rationalist, anti-artistic philistinism by portraying those criticize it as alarmist or hysterical

Just because the tendencies latent within the movement and openly avowed have not fully expressed themselves does not mean we should not say what they are. The guardrails just came off.

You will endlessly encounter people who will acknowledge that every instance of this is stupid without recognizing that it's not mere stupidity: it is action organized by a coherent worldview seeking for hegemony that will not be stopped unless something stops it.

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1143974009392041984?s=21 …

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1143975515226890240?s=21 …

The strongest argument on their side was “this isn’t a museum where people choose to go to be artistically challenged, but a school where kids cannot avoid seeing a vivid mural depicting a dead Indian and black slaves. If we could move it, we would, but we can’t.”

What would in any other setting be seen as a reduction as absurdum is being avowed in earnest as the actual standard. And the truth is that the reality on the ground is likely to be close to that.

The news here is not that some people in a progressive echo chamber have absurd beliefs. That has always been true. The news is that those people have institutional power and are exercising it, and they are just getting started.

The idea that a painting by a major artist from the 1930’s has inherent value that has to be balanced against “even one person triggered” has zero standing. Everyone’s claim to be harmed or endangered is indefeasible and overrides all other values.

The authoritarian potential with which such a belief is charged is obvious; we no longer have to speculate about what those who hold these beliefs are prepared to do: at minimum they will happily force people never to state certain truths and compel them to avow falsehoods

They will also do things like forbid anyone from taking algebra in 8th grade as an ostensible measure against "white supremacy" even though 75 percent of those who take algebra in eighth grade are Asian, as the SF board of ed did a few years back.

With the result that fewer black and Hispanics were able to take calculus in senior years -- producing the exact opposite result to those intendedhttps://twitter.com/KansasisinCalif/status/1131363632590123010 …

The SF Chancellor of Schools who led the push to ban 8th grade algebra then went to NYC, where he has mandated implicit bias training as part of the "decolonizing education" push that emerges from the same body of doctrine:https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1130852783299555329 …