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More from @thestustustudio

Stu

Mar 23

On March 13th, Weill Cornell Medicine, the medical school of Cornell University, hosted the University of Washington's Professor Elle Lett for a talk titled "The Relevance of 'Intersectionality' to Medical Training in the Anti-DEI Era."

This talk has me at a loss for words, but the video will speak for itself. I'm going to neutrally summarize the talk in this thread and will interject my opinion on a few key matters.

One thing I will admit is this, I often walk away from talks like this thinking to myself, "Are we training doctors or are we prioritizing ideology?" 🧵

Nick, a 3rd year MD PhD student and part of the QUIS Queer initiative for physician scientists board introduced Professor Lett.

"Dr. Elle Lett is a Black transgender statistician, epidemiologist, and physician in training. Through her work, she studies how to measure and mitigate the impacts of discrimination on people's health, specifically focusing on population health for trans people of color, police violence as a manifestation of structural racism, and algorithmic bias."

Nick also details Dr. Lett's academic roles and future career trajectory:

"She serves as a clinical assistant professor of Health Systems and Population Health at the University of Washington School of Public Health, scholar in residence at the school's Center for Anti-racism, and associate editor for the Health Equity Journal. After completing medical school this year, she will start residency in emergency medicine."

Prof. Lett explained the structure of her talk. She shared that she would begin by introducing herself and providing some background. Following that, she would define key terms, including DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), and discuss how the current "anti-DEI era" came about.

She also outlined the core of her discussion: defining intersectionality, explaining its relevance to medicine from an external perspective, and exploring why it might be perceived as irrelevant to medical training when viewed from an internal perspective.

Her concluding thoughts would focus on the question of "Where do we go from here?" signaling a forward-looking approach to the integration of these ideas in medical education and practice.

Read 26 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Mar 17

Last week @GlennYoungkin did a media circuit declaring that "DEI is done at the University of Virginia." If that were the case, there wouldn't be a private workshop and seminar on "Decolonizing Your Syllabus" and "Seeing the Unseen: Identifying and Unlearning Colonial Paradigms in Higher Education" which is happening this Friday at UVA.

What does Decolonial thought look like? Here are three professors, all from Virginia's Top 3 Public Universities, discussing Decolonial Theory.

Meet the University of Virginia's Tiffany King, Virginia Tech's Bikrum Gill, and William & Mary's Stephen Sheehi. Do these professors sound like educators or radicals hellbent on destroying America?

"In the moment that you grab the gun like Fanon says, you're no longer oppressed, you're now free. How do we teach that in the class? Just to say that in the class, my students' heads explode. Right? To tell them about violence, you know, as a revolutionary tool, as sometimes a revolutionary essential."

"We actually need to crash the US settler state"

"We must stand with the armed resistance and work right now to end this impunity by disrupting the flow of weapons to Zionist cause. The armed resistance will defeat Zionism if it was open battlefield."

I can't tell you how many times I have heard it, "Decolonialization is not a metaphor." This Trojan Horse ideology has infected campuses all over America and this is what it looks like in Virginia.

Stick around as we look at next week's event at UVA, how Decolonization creates Title VI complaints, and national security concerns related to this! 🧵

Next Friday, The Center for Teaching Excellence at UVA is hosting University of Memphis professor and activist Amanda Lee Keikialoha Savage. As you can see, she will be holding at a seminar and doing a workshop as well. Both of these events are not open to the public.

As you heard in the intro video, UVA's Professor King said, "Challenge what the settler state, the settlement of, the University of Virginia that we're on, which is still a plantation and has all of its plantation artifice up, right, and artifacts. I'm trying to really ride the wheels off of these institutional resources, and go for broke."

Decolonial theorists actually see the university itself as a form of colonization. Frantz Fanon said, "Colonialism is a psychic and epistemological process as much as a material one."

These academic activists see the university as a seat of power that continues to perpetuate inequality, exploitation, and colonial legacies. They believe the university doesn't prioritize Indigenous, Black, and marginalized voices and overly values Western epistemologies as the dominant knowledge systems.

What do you seriously think is going to happen during this talk at a university founded by Thomas Jefferson?

I have this archived just in case UVA deletes it -> cte.virginia.edu/programs/cte-s…

If you look at Title VI complaints, Decolonial Theory often pops up. We could be here all day looking at these, but this complaint from Stanford is more than enough to illustrate my point.

Decolonial theory in the classroom is pure abuse.

"Students in this professor's classes report the professor asking where their ancestors were from and labeled them as a "colonizer" or "colonized."

"I feel absolutely dehumanized that someone in charge of students and developing minds could possibly try and justify the massacre of my people. It's like I'm reliving the justification of Nazis 80 years ago on today's college campus."

I know this will likely spark a debate on academic freedom, but it’s hard for me to view Decolonial Theory as anything other than a Trojan Horse, allowing radical activists to become professors and cultivate radicalized students. It promotes an ideology that places the burden of guilt on "colonizers," despite colonization being a universal phenomenon throughout human history. In doing so, professors are effectively othering students and fostering resentment.

Once again, remember what UVA's Professor King said in the intro.

"Some colleagues who are part of my chapter of Faculty for Justice for Palestine help us teach Palestinian liberation, right, to teach about resistance struggles, at this particular phase of Palestinian resistance in our classrooms and how to build community, with not just faculty, but students who are committed to this."

Read 4 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Mar 12

Some of Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers are from CUNY CLEAR. If only someone had been recording them for the past few years. Oh wait, that person was me.

Here is one of Mahmoud Khalil's lawyers, Shazza Abboushi Dallal, from a CUNY CLEAR training that I snuck into and recorded.

"Another question: what if somebody just pretends complete ignorance to Hamas, don't know what you're talking about.

So I think this question is really like Yeah, I, I would answer the same way. I mean, first of all, saying I don't know when you do know, or feigning ignorance when that's not the reality, could be construed as a misrepresentation or a lie, and you find yourself in the sort of situation that you wanna avoid that we were speaking about earlier of criminal and potential immigration consequences flowing.

And that's why, you know, silence is just, is better. Better and more protective for you."

I can't tell you how many of these sorts of trainings I have attended where legal clinics like CUNY CLEAR urged foreign student activists to be smarter about what they said publicly. They knew this day could come one day. It is here now.

The Legal Rights teach-in where these videos came from can be found here, and I think many would be served in watching it. You will realize quite quickly that Khalil has most certainly violated immigration law and the terms of his residency here in the United States.

"We want to make sure you know [about things that] will create risks for you if you're not a citizen, so that's inciting, advocating, or declaring public approval or support for terrorist activity..."

Teach-in ➡️x.com/thestustustudi…

Here is another one of Khalil's CUNY CLEAR lawyers, Ramzi Kassem, from the Emergency Session: A Survival Guide to Arrests and Jail Support (Within Our Lifetime, CLEAR, MAS NY). This was a legal rights teach-in before the massive New York protest on the 1st anniversary of October 7th.

Much like Dallal, Kassem urges you to be completely silent when dealing with any kind of law enforcement.

Read 6 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Jan 29

🚨Deport Momodou Taal🚨

President Trump just signed an executive order that would instruct federal agencies to cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses.

Cornell graduate student, instructor, and activist Momodou Taal has gotta go! 🧵

If you have been following me for some time, you know that I sit in on all these various activist teach-ins and seminars. After Taal was almost deported last year, he became a hot commodity and started to show up in teach-ins.

I first ran into him during a call hosted by the Young Democratic Socialists of America and Students for Justice in Palestine.

This video is from October 6, 2024.

Almost a month later, he traveled down to Virginia to participate in multiple different events at Virginia Tech. As you heard in the supercut, Taal thinks the most pro-Black stance is to be anti-Zionist. Taal has a deep admiration from Kwame Ture, which is certainly questionable.

Since Taal is suspended from campus, his visa allows him to just be a full-time organizer stoking dissent across America and pushing his radical views.

Read 8 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Nov 9, 2024

Yesterday at the University of Notre Dame, @GovRonDeSantis discussed why college campuses in Florida were not plagued with student encampments.

"If any of our universities turned into Columbia, the university president would lose their job the next day. It would be done. We would not ever tolerate the inmates running the asylum."

DeSantis spends a few minutes examining the claim that Palestine is "occupied" to expose how pro-Palestine clichés "betray their ignorance."

"If you find yourself out there saying somehow 'end occupation,' I would just like to know when there was some type of Palestinian [state]. I think it's all people that don't know their history. I think it's kind of like the Left Wing Cause Du Jour."

This allowed DeSantis to discuss how students who claim Gaza is occupied are "never challenged on their assumptions."

He goes on to discuss how conservative students on campus "learn how to make arguments, you learn how to marshal evidence, you learn these things because no one on a university campus is just going to accept conservative assumptions about any of these issues without a fight."

DeSantis talks about initiatives in Florida that foster civil discourse and free debate.

"I want all of our students to have their assumptions questioned."

"You learn the most when you're given a topic and you have to argue on the side that you actually disagree with."

DeSantis discusses the cold reality of the cost you have to pay to stand up for these issues on campus, but he believes that "the only way for bad to triumph is for good people do nothing."

He wraps up by discussing how he has friends who he disagrees with politically and are able to maintain friendship. However, the Governor notes that he thinks Leftism is a religion for some and that is why people get "disowned for supporting conservative causes." DeSantis think that is dangerous for the country and we need more bipartisan comradery.

Earlier in the talk, DeSantis talked about the institutional reforms that were implemented in Florida to fix the university system.

"Taxpayers fund this university system. They have a right to ensure that the universities are serving a mission that is in the best interest of the state of Florida. It is not acceptable to say you fund the university and the faculty can do whatever the hell. That's not the way it works!"

DeSantis' Achievements with Higher Ed Reform

-First university system to remove D.E.I.
-5-Year Tenure Review
-Bring in professors without being blackballed by faculty
-Establishing the Hamilton Center
-New College as the "Hillsdale College of the South"

🔥 "These are our universities. We have a right to make sure they are serving the classical mission of what a university should be. I'm not interested in underwriting indoctrination camps, and indeed, in the state of Florida, we do not do that." 🔥

Read 4 tweets

Stu

@thestustustudio

Oct 16, 2024

There will be a nationwide Student Strike in Spring 2025. How do I know this? Because it's already being planned by the Young Democratic Socialists of America and Students for Justice in Palestine.

Buckle up as you see many familiar faces like @Cornell's Momodou Taal, who nearly had his student visa revoked, and @Columbia's Sean Eren, a panelist from the infamous pro-terror Resistance 101 teach-in! 🧵

Intros were a tad shaky, but the organizers of this call are...

Saffa Nahi from Cal State Fullerton
Carlos Callejo from Cal Poly Pomona
Aron Ali-McClory from the University of Florida (Note: I remember him from the UF attempts to have an encampment.)

Nahi pauses to introduce the two YDSA Palestine Committee co-chairs.

Daniil Sapunkov from Hunter College
Arjun Janakan from Purdue University

Janakan kicks off this event by saying, "This is our first big event of the school year and the extension of the Student Intifada, and I'm very excited to cohere the national strategy of going forward and making a consistent cohered sense of force into our next upcoming school year of Palestine activism."

Aron Ali-McClory introduces why the students are meeting tonight.

"It's been almost one year to the day since October 7th, 2023, Operation Al Aqsa Flood. We gather here tonight to address the state of the student movement across the country as we endeavor onwards in our fight to dismantle the US Empire and put to an end Israel's settler colonial project."

Carlos Callejo explains that Young Democratic Socialists of America are ready for the fight ahead and don't recognize time, place, and manner restrictions on free speech.

"YDSA doesn't run away from hardship. We embrace it."

Read 20 tweets

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