To the Slaughterhouse with You

“I don’t know how to say it any clearer.”

“Got them in my livestock operation and that’s why we put a rope on some of them and take them to the slaughterhouse. That’s a fact of life with human nature and so forth, I don’t know how to say it any clearer.”

At the invitation of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, fifteen men convened at a palatial villa at a small lake called Wannsee in the western part of Berlin on January 20, 1942.

The topic?

They were to discuss the “Final Solution” of the so-called Jewish question. SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann took official notes at the secret conference. That Jews should be taken to the slaughterhouse was already an article of action in Nazi Germany by the time of the Wannsee Conference.

We know what happened at the meeting, because we have Eichmann’s written notes—the conference minutes.

But as these representatives of Nazi royalty preened and swirled their cognac, what was their banter like? Were they joshing each other about boxcars and slaughterhouses and “culling” the population?

To find out, you could watch a dramatization of the conference, such as this one from Germany in 1984—which is generally considered the finest filmic portrayal of that infamous day—wherein the brutes chortle over the macabre topic of systematized murder.

You could do that, yes.

Or you could simply tune in to a California Community Colleges Board of Trustees meeting, particularly in the Kern district.

A Rare Moment of Murderous Honesty

For instance, see the district’s December 13 meeting to discover what repartee might have been heard at the Wannsee Conference. You can watch the video yourself—I recommend beginning at the 1:40 mark.

Pay close attention to one Mr. John Corkins, whose quote begins this piece. Corkins elaborated on his solution to the problem of faculty who don’t hew his party’s line: “They’re in that five percent that we have to continue to cull.”

One of his fellow trustees, Nan Gomez-Heitzeberg, chuckled heartily at the suggestion. Another smiled.

Yes, John Corkins was speaking of human beings—college professors and staff at Bakersfield College, to be exact. But who is this Corkins?

Corkins is an entrepreneur and a real-estate developer with a master’s degree in agriculture. It’s not difficult to picture him in a tailored SS uniform, joshing with the fellows about solving the “problem” of faculty, those who understand Enlightenment principles, scholarship, and intellectual inquiry far better than Corkins ever will.

Those faculty who nettle him so naughtily include tenured professors of history Matthew Garrett and Erin Miller. They’re part of a group called the Renegade Institute for Liberty, which is:

Dedicated to the free speech, open inquiry, critical thinking to advance American ideals within the broader Western tradition of meritocracy, individual agency, civic virtue, liberty of conscience and free markets. These ideologies underpin the American Experiment, long serving as the nation’s primary bulwark against the political and ideological tyranny of both individuals and of the masses. As an advocate for intellectual literacy and diversity, the Renegade Institute for Liberty reaffirms civil, religious, and economic freedom upon which academe and the nation must stand or fall. Through intellectual exploration and reason, the Institute works to preserve each of the above virtues as necessary for a free people and to advance the cause of liberty in America.

Poor John Corkins has no clue as to the foundations of the university and the principles of a free society, nor does he appear to care. He sounds like a Nazi party hack calling for the elimination, or “culling,” of the “five percent.”

[Related: “The Conspiracist Fantasy of University Bureaucracies”]

Corkins wants to remove these faculty from Bakersfield College because a motley collection of students and a professor showed up at the trustees meeting to express their fear of the aforementioned principles and the professors who support them. Corkins obliged; here is his statement:

Bakersfield College student Jordyn Davis, BC professor Dr. Paula Parks, and several statewide representatives from the Umoja program, which is dedicated to improving educational outcomes for African-American students, bravely shared their feelings of fear based on the actions of a small group of faculty members and their feelings of disappointment in the district for allowing these actions to continue.

Corkins waxed eloquent about the bravery of the professor and students who felt “unsafe” because of—well, we really don’t know what “actions” make them feel “unsafe.” This is characteristic of “safety rhetoric,” what Lukianoff and Haidt have called campus “safetyism.”

The “Safe Space” Marker of Paranoid Ideology

“Safety” rhetoric—safety, safe spaces, and “microaggressions”—is the current lingo of paranoia and conspiracy. It’s a product of an elaborate performative ritual whose goal is to prevent an examination of what, exactly, constitutes the so-called “threat” to safety.

Such is the case here. Let’s look, because it’s instructive.

What were the specific complaints of the students and the professor? They recounted that they had earlier attended a meeting and did not like some of the professors’ facial expressions. They also accused the professors of “racism,” but either would not or could not express what, exactly, constituted the “racism.”

This has become the modus operandi of paranoid critical racialists—to display angst, to issue vague charges of “racism,” and to count on not answering the most basic of questions.

This hostility toward facts, evidence, proof, examples, and simple questions is a key marker for critical racialist conspiracy. It has been extant for as long as the pseudo-scholarship of “lived experience”—that is to say, anecdote—has been tolerated.

Take this instance from a 1970 article in the Berkeley Journal of Sociology, “The Furious Passage of the Black Graduate Student,” by Douglas Davidson:

The author had intended a few examples of unintentional racism but soon realized that it would be little better than useless to argue to a largely white audience that seemingly innocuous things that they do and say are racist. It is not our task to attempt to prove your racism to you. Our task is to sense that racism and thereby continue to survive.

True to this form, a self-described “clinical psychologist” by the name of Ravel Nichols spoke at length about his own experiences at the University of Nevada, Reno, but he contributed nothing about Bakersfield College. He falsely accused the Bakersfield professors of violence and called for their termination. He provided no evidence of threats of violence nor of actual “racism.”

Because no evidence exists.

Conspiracism Rampant on Campus

Consistent with conspiracy theories and their proponents, the complaining students and the professor provided no examples of “racist” incidents, harrowing or otherwise. Their contentions were evidence-free, and you can see this for yourself. Viewing the video is highly instructive in this regard. You await something that is shocking and terrifying, or at least real and substantial, that might justify a call for termination of many faculty members from the college, and then—

Nothing.

But what about those pesky “microaggressions” that are seemingly ubiquitous? The word sounds ominous. What is it?

This tired trope was invented in the 1970s by psychiatrist Chester Pierce and is the key to understanding the fakery of the paranoid project called antiracism. The “microaggression” is the codification of paranoiac theorizing about race that artificially inflates the myth of “rampant racism” on campus through pseudo-incidents that encompass “actions that are ambiguous in intent to harm, difficult to detect, low in intensity, and often unintentional.”

In other words, “contrived.”

[Related: “Welcome to Bedlam College”]

Columbia Teachers College social psychologist and “certified hypnotherapist” Derald Wing Sue is the chief proponent of this ingenious tool. He publishes virtually the same article repeatedly, usually with different batches of his graduate students, based on smoke and mirrors and “lived experience.” His career appears to have suffered not at all from his long-time collaboration with the notorious plagiarist and noose hoaxer Madonna Constantine.

Another person who earns a good living from this contrivance is Ruchika Tulshyan, who pens a column for the Harvard Business Review called “Marginalized Groups.” It appears as a regular feature to cultivate her readers’ hypervigilance and to affirm their narcissism, grandiosity, and paranoid delusions.

Evidence-Free Tropes of Paranoia

These contrivances have become so pervasive that the students and professors who presented at the Kern Board of Trustees meeting expect their viewpoints, narratives, anecdotes, and ideology to be accepted unconditionally. When that doesn’t happen, their response is that of the paranoid conspiracy theorist, who reflexively attacks anyone who dares question the conspiracy.

What to do about all of this?

My own view is that the board should have recommended that the complaining students and professor be evaluated for paranoia and adherence to conspiracy theory, but that’s another article altogether. The chief worry here is this member of the board and his cavalier attitude that, if we are to believe the meeting video, is shared by at least several of his colleagues.

He probably wishes that he had kept intemperate comments for the “executive session,” where boards of trustees can presumably speak freely about “roping,” “culling,” and the “slaughterhouse.”

Corkins clearly doesn’t know that the persons complaining to the board are either paranoiacs or displaying performative behavior that they have learned on their campus as part of the “antiracism” project. He himself is participating in the performance by accepting the baseless accusations of these persons to create their very own paranoid pseudocommunity of persecutors.

Since he has nothing to lose, Corkins plays along. And his chums on the board chuckle with him as he cracks wise about ropes and slaughterhouses and “that 5 percent that we have to continue to cull.”

Corkins is no outlier. He simply revealed himself unwittingly. Corkins’ problem was that he grew a bit too comfortable and voiced his real thoughts into a microphone rather than wait for the executive session. His problem redounds to our benefit.

Corkins’s non-apology is risible. He should be removed immediately from the board of trustees of the Kern Community College District. At minimum. He represents the minds of radical fellow travelers who populate campuses nationwide.

His board cronies should be vetted thoroughly for their silence in the face of Corkins’ brutish display, particularly Nan Gomez-Heitzeberg, whose eerie chuckles are almost as chilling as Corkins’ honest expression of a violent threat.

Let’s sum up the situation: Students and a professor are given a forum to falsely accuse faculty of threats of “violence” and “racism” without a shred of proof, a member of the board of trustees accepts the twaddle, and then he actually threatens faculty and staff with killing. That the college must deal with this clueless and apparently murderous bureaucrat, as well as others who are more circumspect and close-lipped, is the real issue here.

Culling is needed, for certain.

Let’s begin the culling with pugnacious government-appointed bureaucrats like Corkins, who would likely feel right at home guffawing alongside Heydrich and Eichmann between sips of cognac.

Roll those trains to the slaughterhouse, eh, Gruppenführer Corkins?

Image: Adobe Stock