Leftists have often been accused of shredding the Constitution. And now it appears that many of them are more than willing to do so — literally.
So reports Project Veritas (PV), which discovered that when confronted by an undercover reporter posing as a student and claiming the “racist” Constitution upset her, most college officials were willing to destroy it.
Presented in a series of three videos (first one below), the PV journalist’s appeal was melodramatic and politically correct in the extreme. After telling a college official the Constitution was being distributed on campus, she’d make a statement such as, “I didn’t think that this would happen, but I realized that the Constitution is kind of a trigger for me. Overall, I see it just as a really oppressive document.… I mean, I am, like, scared to walk around campus and see the Constitution.”
Despite this overwrought approach, none of the academics and administrators suspected a setup.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
And most responses ranged from sympathy to aggressive advocacy of the journalist’s position.
Wendy Kozol (whose responses exhibited poor grammar), professor/chair of Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College, was asked if she saw the Constitution as flawed and replied, “Yeah, yeah, right.” She then wondered if there were any groups willing to take “a critical look at the way in which the Constitution and everyday life causes people pain.” Moreover, when asked if the document could be deemphasized on campus, Kozol replied somewhat emphatically, “Absolutely.… I think there is [sic] a lot of people who will agree with you.”
Yet she appeared the campus conservative relative to colleague Carol Lasser, professor of history and Oberlin’s director of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies. She chimed in with the PV reporter, “The Constitution is an oppressive document. It makes change slow; it intends to make change slow.”
Nonetheless, in keeping with leftist situational values, she did think the document had situational value. “Right now, given who is in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives, I think it’s a good thing,” she whispered. Soon afterwards she trumpeted birthright citizenship and said, “And you know that if it was up for a vote today, we would lose it under the craziness of Trump and his seven dwarfs, right?”
In other words, you have to have the correct people in power to violate the Constitution.
Lasser also said that the Founders “never envisioned giving people carte blanche to own assault rifles.” Of course, they certainly never envisioned television or the Internet either. One might wonder if she’d limit First Amendment speech rights to those with soapboxes or printing presses.
Yet it is true that the Constitution is like a conservative in that, to quote Bill Buckley, it “stands athwart history, yelling ‘Stop.’” Because the only consistent definition of “conservative” is a desire to maintain the status quo — and because this is precisely what the Constitution ensures by making change slow — it is by definition a “conservative” document. This explains why leftists dislike and continually violate it.
Note, however, that there’s a name for a creature subject to sudden change: a child. This is why children are so flighty. But age and experience bring a hardening to the soft clay that is the babe, yielding a more stable being. Likewise, a civilization subject to rapid change is a childish one. The Constitution lends stability, for change’s adoption must be slow so it can be carefully considered, as “change” so often means “new and untested.”
But no less childish was Colleen Cohen, faculty director of affirmative action & professor of anthropology at Vassar. She said, “It’s horrible that this is something that has caused you such pain” as she commiserated with the PV reporter. Some seconds later she enthusiastically asked in reference to the Constitution, “Can I destroy this?” Upon receiving the go-ahead, she promised to put it through a shredder. As for her colleague Kelly Grab, Vassar’s assistant director of Equal Opportunity, she could be seen shredding the Constitution right on (hidden) camera.
Officials at Syracuse, Cornell, and Yale universities were no better (video below). As PV wrote, “Cornell’s Elizabeth McGrath shreds the Constitution, Syracuse’s Sheila Johnson-Willis cuts it up with a pair of scissors, and Yale’s Jason Killheffer actually uses his bare hands to rip the constitution to shreds.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v==4THEcWCpEgQ
Carley Wyche, assistant equal opportunity officer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, went even further. When the PV reporter asked if the Constitution could be removed from dormitory common areas, she was more than willing. As Campus Reform reported:
Wyche left a voicemail for the reporter in which she says, “I just wanted to let you know, I got in contact with Veronica Cooley, who is the assistant director of Northeast campus, [and] she assured me that she would talk to the RA’s and the community director about making sure that there is [sic] no longer any Constitutions in the entryway of Berry Hall.”
… The reporter also asked Wyche to shred the Constitution, to which Wyche replied that she would like to hold on to it for a day or two, just to make sure that other administrators would know exactly which document she was referring to, but encouraged the reporter to “come by my office and then we’ll put it through the shredder; hopefully that would help and we should be able to deal with them in a couple of days.” [Video below.]
Only two college officials — at Duke University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill — defended the distribution of the Constitution (though somewhat tepidly) and refused to destroy the document.
PV’s sting operation won’t surprise astute observers, who’ve long recognized academia as a bastion of leftism. Yet it does illustrate well its intellectual vacuity, points out College Fix editor Jennifer Kabbany. As she wrote:
None of them dared think to turn this into a [teaching] moment by saying: “Look … the U.S. Constitution is one of the most groundbreaking documents in the history of the world, studied by students from kindergarten on up. It’s what spells out our nation’s laws and grants us the freedoms we all enjoy today. Many people in countries such as Iran, China and Russia would kill to be governed by it. You need to get a grip on yourself and gain some perspective.”
Others have made a point about hypocrisy. Under an article about how Cornell defended its resident shredder, Title IX investigator Elizabeth McGrath, one reader posted, “Somehow I have a sneaking suspicion that if a student showed up with a LGBT publication and urged that it be shredded because it was traumatizing, Miss McGrath would have declined to destroy it.” And one can just imagine the response if a “traumatized” student requested the Koran’s shredding. The reader concluded, “The left has become so vile and disgusting that nothing is beneath them.”
Yet even James O’Keefe, president of PV, was surprised the sting actually worked. Said he about the college officials, “We underestimated just how stupid, and politically correct, these people are.”
Sadly, though, PV’s request was well within the “acceptable” range on college campuses, places where one can actually find courses such as “The Phallus,” “Queer Musicology,” and “Border Crossings, Borderlands: Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Immigration.” And given that President John Adams warned how our Constitution was unfit for the government of any but a “moral and religious people,” we could wonder if it’s fit for today’s moderns. For a people who would shred it cannot help but shred their rights, freedoms and the very fabric of civilization.
