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What Do Student Tantrums Mean?

Posted on | November 13, 2015 | 36 Comments

Keely Mullen (@kjmspeaks) of #MillionStudentMarch.

The protests this week that forced the resignation of two top officials at the University of Missouri came on the heels of earlier protests at Yale University that forced an apology from Nicholas Christakis.

Meanwhile, students at California’s Claremont McKenna College have staged their own mob action:

A CMC student embarked on a hunger strike Wednesday that quickly resulted in the resignation of Dean of Students Mary Spellman. Much like those at Missouri, CMC students have complained about both specific incidents and a general climate of alleged hostility towards minority groups.
The strike was over Spellman’s response to an email from CMC student Lisette Espinosa, which according to critics showed CMC regards itself as a place for white, upper-class students who view all others as outsiders.
Espinosa had shared an article with Spellman she had written about feeling unwelcome at the school as a low-income racial minority, and Spellman had responded by saying she was working hard to assist students “who don’t fit our CMC mold.”

Tuition at Claremont McKenna is $49,045 a year. Whether or not students there “fit the mold,” none of them are underprivileged. It is an elite institution with an endowment of $700 million, and every student on campus is a beneficiary of enormous privileges that the vast majority of Americans will never have. If there are any Claremont McKenna students who are smart but poor — so that the high tuition was a problem — they could have saved more than $35,000 a year by attending the University of California-Berkeley, where in-state students pay a paltry $13,432 annual tuition. And yet a student at Claremont was willing to stage a hunger strike because the dean awkwardly phrased an email?

What the hell has gotten into these kids? A cynic might look at the recent eruption of campus activism (and by “activism,” of course I mean petulant tantrums) and suspect that these students are just young Democrats, warming up for the 2016 presidential campaign, the same way the 2011 “Occupy Wall Street” protests were a warm-up for Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign. Learning how to manipulate media coverage to control the political narrative is the most important skill any young Democrat ever learns at college, and inciting their fellow students to think of themselves as Oppressed Victims of Society will invariably add to Hillary Clinton’s vote total in the crucial 18-24 demographic. (“Look! Those evil right-wingers are trying to silence your voices!”) So the cynic may perceive mere partisan politics as the motive of these puerile tantrums, but is it possible that there really are larger issues involved?

And by “larger issues,” of course, I mean intractable stupidity:

“Million Student March” national organizer Keely Mullen made an appearance on Fox Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” on Thursday and discussed her protest promoting free college, debt forgiveness and a $15 minimum wage for students.
When Mullen was pressed by host Neil Cavuto on how she finance this proposal, she stumbled with her response but eventually proposed a 90 percent tax on top income earners.
“Great question, I mean, you know, so — I’m not sure if you’re talking about a national level or per school?” Mullen said when initially asked.
“I live in a world and I see a system around me where there is a population that is doing nothing to contribute to the progression of society,” she added.

Keely Mullen attends elite Northeastern University (annual tuition $45,530) and yet watch how she stumbles in this interview:

It is apparent that the simple question — “How are you going to pay for this?” — had never crossed Keely Mullen’s mind until Neil Cavuto asked her. To say “tax the rich” is an insufficient answer because (a) it is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate the total cost of what the “Million Student March” is demanding; and (b) rich people are not just a piggy bank that can be cracked open and plundered for the benefit of whatever political movement proposes to take away their money to fund “the progression of society,” as Miss Mullen so clumsily phrased it.

Keely Mullen is majoring in political science but it would seem she doesn’t know the first damned thing about Basic Economics. Before any government can tax a dollar, you see, that dollar must first be earned by the production and exchange of goods and services in a market where consumers are the demand and producers compete to provide the supply. Wealth is the accumulation of excess income, and is deployed as capital in the marketplace as investment, where the owners of wealth — including everybody who has a 401(k) retirement plan — seek to earn dividends by owning shares in enterprises that yield profit. Whatever the rate of taxation, or whatever governments do with the revenue gained by taxation, it is the success of the market economy that produces the income and wealth that are ultimately the source of tax revenue. If taxation or other government policies hinder the growth of the market economy (for example, by disincentivizing capital investment), then government is killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is the market economy that pays for everything, including the various government programs that already subsidize tuition for college students.

Is that too difficult for Keely Mullen to understand? I did not attend an elite college. I went to Jacksonville (Ala.) State University, where tuition even in 2015 is still only $8,790 a year. You could send five kids to JSU for the cost of sending one kid to Northeastern University, where political science majors don’t even understand Basic Economics, so how is it that a dumb redneck like me can explain this stuff? Perhaps it is because my professors were aware of how vastly ignorant the average student is. In contrast to posh private schools like Northeastern and Claremont McKenna, no professor at JSU ever takes it for granted that the teenager sitting in a classroom knows anything. Whereas the kids at elite campuses are treated like Special Snowflakes whose delicate sensibilities should never be offended — “Trigger warning!” — the student at Jax State doesn’t expect to be pampered and flattered by the adults who are paid to teach him the knowledge and skills necessary to earn his way in that frightening place called The Real World.

There are kids at JSU waiting tables and flipping burgers to pay their way through school, and those kids may never lead any national protest movement, but they will certainly “contribute to the progression of society.” Keely Mullen, on the other hand, is a useless parasite whose “activism” is about encouraging others to become useless parasites:

Student pursuing opportunities in community organizing and anti-racism advocacy work. My specific interests lie in the intersections of racial injustice and public education.

Oh, but Keely Mullen didn’t attend public school. The snowflake is an alumna of Chicago’s prestigious Francis W. Parker School, where annual tuition is $32,830. So this privileged parasite is now spending Daddy’s money to seek “opportunities in community organizing,” as opposed to doing anything useful in terms of providing goods and services in the market economy. If vicious brats like Keely Mullen are the future of America, we are totally and hopelessly doomed.

Read SJWs Always Lie by Vox Day. Don’t let your kids become SJWs. Make your kids read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.





 

Category: Economics, Education

Comments

36 Responses to “What Do Student Tantrums Mean?”

  1. Fail Burton
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:35 pm

    The first thing Keely needs to do is learn that nothing I do is any of her business. The second thing she needs to do is stop being in denial. If she wants to look around and see people acting as an anchor on progress, she only needs to look in the mirror and in black neighborhoods. That stupid alliance is the one which shows off anti-Israel flags at protests. What you should be doing is sending black groups to Israel to learn how Israel was created in only 3 years after the death camps of WW II and with no one’s help and against mountains of opposition. There was no whining, no affirmative action and no welfare.

  2. RS
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:39 pm

    Sadly, what she will learn is that Israel had the temerity to win. “Winners” equal “oppression.” You can only be a victim or an oppressor. There is no middle ground, and because the Israelis chose not to be the former, they are the latter. To the feeble-minded, it makes perfect sense.

  3. Joe Guelph
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:39 pm

    She’s a second-generation idiotarian. Her dad, Steven Mullen (he of the million-dollar mansion) is a Professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. According to his online bio, he “identifies as trans-feminine and “gender-mobile,” prefers “they/them” pronouns, and works to be an ear and an advocate for the wide diversity of student identities at SAIC.”
    http://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/stevemullen/

  4. M. Thompson
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:43 pm

    I am admiring Bonaparte for his treatment of an angry mob right now because of these thoughtless diltantes and purblind wordlings. (With apologies to Sir Winston for the last phrase)

  5. RS
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:44 pm

    What we’re seeing is a bunch of spoiled brats deciding that someone else (Yale and Mizzou) has something (publicity) that they don’t have and like a bunch of beagle pups, they’re all rushing to piss on the same spot.

    (FYI, in the late ’70s, I had to take 6 hours of Economics to graduate with an A.B. in literature. Two most interesting courses, I ever took, taught by an elderly professor who threw chalk at someone who had the temerity to show up late for class. Those were the days.)

  6. Mike G.
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:44 pm

    One of my Granddaughter’s friends from HS goes to that college. She’s gay, so she should fit right in.

  7. CrustyB
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:45 pm

    So when I walk into the AIC I’m walking into a real-life Monty Python sketch.

  8. RS
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:46 pm

    Sport’s journalist Jason Whitlock (who’s black FWIW) on the kerfuffle at Mizzou.

  9. kbiel
    November 13th, 2015 @ 3:57 pm

    Transcript for the illogic impaired:
    “But, like um yeah. Yeah, like uh, one percent. Um yeah, like tax, uh socialism. Yeah, I uh don’t believe um the facts.”

  10. mikegiles
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:08 pm

    I think these protests are being led by students who have gone into debt to obtain BS degrees in crappy subjects which will never allow them to pay back the money they’ve borrowed. So they’re trying to overturn the system to get out from under. These universities would be better off kicking these losers to the curb, and refunding their tuition money to the bank and/or person they got it from, sans degree of course.

  11. Fail Burton
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:14 pm

    Whitlock says some smart stuff but he doesn’t quite have the stupid ironed out of him. His idea of the NCAA exploiting black athletes is one of them. If there was that type of hostility in place in the first place, why would they even be playing? Secondly, if it was college hockey or baseball, which are almost all white, he wouldn’t care.

    It reminds me of this stupid idea that drug laws “target” blacks. What they really mean is that any law which a lot of blacks happen to break suddenly becomes a conspiracy against blacks. If a lot of blacks suddenly did white collar crimes would hip-hop moguls start lobbying congress? People like Whitlock reverse engineer this shit to get the desired effect.

  12. Ilion
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:15 pm

    “These universities would be better off kicking these losers to the curb, and refunding their tuition money to the bank and/or person they got it from …”
    They will never do that, of course. They *cannot* do that. The sole purpose of the modern “university” is to siphon $ out of the pockets of the taxpayers and gullible “students” so as to redistribute it to the administrators and faculty (most of whom are hypocritical Marxists, anyway).

  13. Fail Burton
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:25 pm

    Asteroid, do your stuff.

  14. Fail Burton
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:28 pm

    You have it right. In this system of thought, normality, or anything that works or is successful is an “oppression.” That’s the origins of “compulsory heterosexuality.” It’s a clever, circular con game, because in a healthy society failure is always going to be in the minority and so oppression is ready at hand to be exploited as such. But by this system of thought, cow-milking competitions and tuba players are oppressed.

  15. Ilion
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:33 pm

    “What do we want?”

    We don’t know!

    “How do we want it?”

    Free!

    “How much do we want it?”

    More!

    “When do we want it?”

    Yesterday!

  16. RS
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:34 pm

    I actually agree with Whitlock on the NCAA stuff. Division 1 FBS schools make a lot of money. With the advent of ESPN, the TV dollars are huge and they all go to the universities, not the players who are generating the cash.

  17. RS
    November 13th, 2015 @ 4:36 pm

    “What do we want?”

    Better memory!

    “When do we want it?

    Want what?

  18. Dana
    November 13th, 2015 @ 5:00 pm

    Social Justice Warriors don’t understand economics, because if they did understand economics they wouldn’t be Social Justice Warriors; the very concept excludes understanding much about anything.

  19. Fail Burton
    November 13th, 2015 @ 5:38 pm

    So what? Let the black players build stadiums, provide uniforms and balls, referees, set up divisions, schedules and TV and radio contracts. Simple. Just rake in that easy money. This isn’t all cut and dried. These traditions go back well over 100 years and they belong to the schools which created and nurtured those traditions. To the victor goes the spoils. And let’s be honest, this popularity owes more to TV on-air sports writing and cutting edge TV production values than it does better players.

  20. Quartermaster
    November 13th, 2015 @ 5:40 pm

    A “whiff of grape” would, perhaps, have been appropriate for the weird English Prof who tried to run off the student reporter.

  21. Jim R
    November 13th, 2015 @ 5:42 pm

    It’s very simple to me:

    This spoiled brat wants to pick my pocket, shut me up, and wax self-righteous while she does it.

    Fvck all those little fascist thieves.

  22. Finrod Felagund
    November 13th, 2015 @ 6:13 pm

    Fuck ’em with a rusty running chainsaw, repeatedly.

  23. M. Thompson
    November 13th, 2015 @ 6:25 pm

    #SMOD2016

  24. Quartermaster
    November 13th, 2015 @ 7:58 pm

    If you’re interested, and have an hour and 20 to burn, this guy can tell you how and where all this trash originated. The interview is from around 1984. he also relates what would happen to these useful idiots and why.

  25. Daniel O'Brien
    November 13th, 2015 @ 8:13 pm

    Math is hard.

  26. DeadMessenger
    November 13th, 2015 @ 8:46 pm

    Wonder what Mrs. Mullen thinks of “trans-feminine” and “gender mobile”?

    *sigh* I remember the good ol’ days when a person would literally be committed for saying stuff like that.

  27. Matt_SE
    November 13th, 2015 @ 10:51 pm

    I posted this on The Federalist, but it bears repeating:
    I’m taking a cultural class at uni, and a week ago the instructor asks us how many students would be willing to march for free tuition.
    I assumed it was her retarded socialism surfacing again, but a couple of days later, we get this million student march bullshit.

    It occurs to me now that the Sanders campaign put all these SJW shits up to organizing a socialist march countrywide.

  28. Animal
    November 13th, 2015 @ 11:53 pm

    She went full retard.

    Never go full retard.

  29. melmoth
    November 14th, 2015 @ 6:31 am

    “Keeley”

    That right there is all you need to know.

  30. melmoth
    November 14th, 2015 @ 6:32 am

    What do we want?
    –“A cure for tourette’s!”
    When do we want it?
    –“Cunt!”

  31. melmoth
    November 14th, 2015 @ 6:34 am

    I think she went “Full Keeley”. Never go “Full Keeley” or “Full McKayla” or “Full Colton” or “Full Braden” or “Full Dakota” or “Full Greyson”

    Fuck all these “My child will not be like the others” names.

  32. melmoth
    November 14th, 2015 @ 6:37 am

    Isn’t “Inequality on our campus” an oxymoron anyway?

    They get to go to university.

    What next? “End Inequality at the Rolex Boutique”

  33. Mary Hickman
    November 14th, 2015 @ 6:52 am

    .?my neighbor’s mom is making $98 HOURLY on the internet?….A few days ago new McLaren F1 subsequent after earning 18,512$,,,this was my previous month’s paycheck ,and-a little over, $17k Last month ..3-5 h/r of work a day ..with extra open doors & weekly paychecks.. it’s realy the easiest work I have ever Do.. I Joined This 7 months ago and now making over $87, p/h..Learn More right Here….
    3skk…..
    ??
    ??? http://GlobalSuperEmploymentVacanciesReportWorld/GetPaid/$97hourly… ?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?

  34. Sonja Tyson
    November 15th, 2015 @ 12:09 am

    Omigawd, my dog is smarter. The sad reality is my inability to pay for my children to go to her college is much more real than her made-up working class background. She’ll get the degree and the government/NGO jobs all the while masturbating that underprivileged background. It’s that weird combination of elitism propped up with victim-hood status.

  35. Gail Hall
    November 15th, 2015 @ 4:50 am

    .?my neighbor’s mom is making $98 HOURLY on the internet?….A few days ago new McLaren F1 subsequent after earning 18,512$,,,this was my previous month’s paycheck ,and-a little over, $17k Last month ..3-5 h/r of work a day ..with extra open doors & weekly paychecks.. it’s realy the easiest work I have ever Do.. I Joined This 7 months ago and now making over $87, p/h..Learn More right Here….
    4kaa…………
    ??
    ??? http://GlobalSuperEmploymentVacanciesReportNetz/GetPaid/$97hourly… ?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?.?

  36. News of the Week (November 15th, 2015) | The Political Hat
    November 15th, 2015 @ 6:52 pm

    […] What Do Student Tantrums Mean? The protests this week that forced the resignation of two top officials at the University of Missouri came on the heels of earlier protests at Yale University that forced an apology from Nicholas Christakis. […]