A Sacrifice at the Altar
“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”
You have seen it in these pages before and I stand by them: I am a conservative, free-thinker where it applies to economic issues, and I really believe that government at every level does things rather poorly. The founders gave us a constitution, modeled by the states, which limits their ability to enslave us with laws, ideologies, and religions in such a way to trap us into a way of life that makes us less free. Our culture, with all of its competing issues reflects this. All values in America are competing against one another constantly, if they are not colluding against another set of values to be crushed.
These constitutions, unfortunately, get pushed to the extremes by powerful forces on what have become known as the extreme left, sometimes called democrats, communists, socialists, reds, pinkos, or whatever other euphemism one cares to apply or the extreme right, usually applied to republicans, nazis, fascists, Q-Anons, patriots (whatever that has come to mean these days), and white supremacists.
The lines between left and right have become so muddled that government negotiations between democrats and republicans have become nearly impossible. Extremes on either side have insured gridlock, and ugliness—with no middle ground for agreement of any kind—for most of the last 15 years.
It doesn’t help that political rhetoric includes vile personal attacks on the personal features of another human being, or their heritage. Now we have a return to the variety of discourse that we had in the early to middle 1950s, and I am just waiting for a new low to expose the loathsomeness of our discourse yet again.
Seventy years ago, we had McCarthyism. This decade we have Wokism, but no one can pin down a solid definition for it. With Wokism, we have its extreme right counterpart Anti-wokism. The best I can tell, Wokism began in 2014 after the Ferguson, Missouri protests, and the phrase “Woke” was popularized by Black Lives Matter activists in an attempt to raise awareness about police shootings of black people. The internet being what it is, “woke” became a meme and was used widely by those of other races and cultures around the world, being added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017. More recently, it has made its way into economics in the form of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), thanks to the World Economic Forum. I wrote a little about this in my last blog.
In this episode of things that government does poorly, we have constitutional government. What McCarthyism was to the 1950s, Anti-wokism is becoming to the 2020s. This, in large measure thanks to Governor, and perhaps presidential candidate in 2024, Ron DeSantis of Florida.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the Anti-woke takeover of New College in Sarasota, Florida a very small, free-thinking liberal arts college founded in the early 1960s. Because New College receives state funding, its methods, curriculum, and staff all became targets of the new Anti-woke Agenda being espoused by DeSantis, and which he has, so far, successfully applied in the takeover of property controlled for the last 50-plus years by the Disney Corporation, formerly in control of huge tracts of land surrounding Disney World in central Florida around Orlando.
Not to go into too many details about New College (you can read about it here) but DeSantis put one of his own political buddies in charge of the school and they fired the board of trustees in favor of people sympathetic to the Anti-woke cause, however conveniently defined at the time this may be.
Now, a private Christian college known as Palm Beach Atlantic University has sacrificed one of its own on the Anti-woke altar, and didn’t even offer the “left foot of fellowship” as they cut his contract short. He was told, following his suspension last month, to stay off campus until a decision was made about his contract—there is no tenure at this school—and he would be advised of a decision regarding his future.
The issue? An Advanced Composition course with a single unit about Racial Justice. After being off campus for a month, Dr. Sam Joeckel’s 21 year career at PBAU was over. It has been said—no proof, of course—that this began as the result of a complaint from a student to a parent, and then to the college about “indoctrinating students”.
On his last day on campus February 15, Dr. Joeckel was greeted by his department head and a dean to be advised of his suspension. It was a brief conversation. Governor DeSantis was being welcomed on campus for a speaking event. Here’s some irony for you: The chapel on campus is named for his family, and is the most prominent building on campus.
DeSantis was there with the Attorney General to promote a bill protecting Floridians from censorship or policing by Big Tech! Evidently, he thinks government policing and censorship will work better. AG Moody said, “We’re here today to say we’re gonna give them that reboot, a little tech-support Florida style, don’t tread on Florida.”
In the meantime, Dr. Joeckel languished at home and wondered about his future and the futures of his teen children. I hope he lands on his feet in a far better position. It’s really a shame that young adults, who were being encouraged to think for themselves, as Scripture teaches us to do, were being indoctrinated in the Anti-woke culture of the 2020’s extreme right that will shred the nation the way McCarthyism did in the 1950s.
Dr. Joeckel’s syllabus gave a reading list from such “woke” authors as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, among others and had been in use 12 years until that day.
I must say though, if I am going to be tread upon by anyone, I’d rather it be someone I have a choice about whose work I read, rather than a faceless, nameless government bureaucrat who will now decide what I can and cannot consume in a book or online. But this is what, apparently, Ron DeSantis would like to do if he becomes your next president.
As a Jesus-follower myself, I am very troubled that a Christian school would handle things this way. I see very little to none of this in our discourse of late:
He grants a treasure of common sense to the honest. He is a shield to those who walk with integrity. Proverbs 2:7
Somehow, I don’t think firing college professors with no notice for doing their job, or book banning and other censorship in colleges gets the country on the path toward common sense.
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