TexaCan Loc: Homeward Bound!

EDUCATION
Hillsdale to BLM: No T'anks
The small but stout college rejected calls to submit to the Black Lives Matter mob.

Douglas Andrews · Jun. 25, 2020


Hillsdale, a small conservative college of 1,400 students tucked away in a sleepy southern Michigan town, is The Little School That Could, the smallish kid that punches way above his weight. And so it was last week, when the school took a lonely but principled stand against the nation’s most powerful pressure group: Black Lives Matter.

BLM, whose very name is a straw man, has been making its way across the country in the wake of the George Floyd riots, shaking down every organization and corporate entity it deems worth the trouble. Ten million dollars is the protection price for Big Tech brands like Amazon and Facebook — at least for now. But if you’re Nike, and you take orders from the likes of Colin Kaepernick, you’re on the hook for $40 million.

Nice business ya got there. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.

As for Hillsdale, the school has come under pressure from a handful of alumni and students in recent days to make a statement in support of BLM — you know, a show of subservience like those of Harvard and Yale.

“Say that Black Lives Matter and they will be protected by Hillsdale College and its graduates,” said a recent graduate and one of the school’s petitioners.

Hillsdale made a statement all right: No.

Not that “no” means the school is in any way insensitive to the plight of black Americans past or present. As its History page points out, Hillsdale “was the first American college to prohibit in its charter any discrimination based on race, religion, or sex, and became an early force for the abolition of slavery.” In fact, the school’s anti-slavery reputation and its role in founding a new political party — the Republican Party — attracted Frederick Douglass to speak there.

Suffice it to say that Hillsdale has plenty of street cred on matters of race and equality.

“It is not the practice of the College to respond to petitions or other instruments meant to gain an object by pressure,” said Hillsdale’s leadership in a letter to the school newspaper, The Collegian.

“There is a kind of virtue that is cheap,” the letter continues. “It consists of jumping on cost-free bandwagons of public feeling —  perhaps even deeply justified public feeling — and winning approval by espousing the right opinion. … The fact that very real racial problems are now being cynically exploited for profit, gain, and public favor by some organizations and people is … a scandal and a shame that compounds our ills and impedes their correction. Hillsdale College, though far from perfect, will continue to do the work of education in the great principles that are, second only to divine grace, the solution to the grave ills that beset our times.”

Hillsdale, then, understands what the schools with the multibillion-dollar endowments do not: Appeasement only invites more appeasement. Besides, the demand to “Say that Black Lives Matter and they will be protected” would seem to imply that the school’s default position is that black lives don’t matter and that black students aren’t protected — a position that’s both laughable and obscene.

Or, to put it in terms that Hillsdale President and early Patriot Post endorser Dr. Larry Arnn might appreciate, “For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?” (That’s Hamilton in Federalist No. 84, for you Ivy Leaguers.)

Hillsdale also received support from a recent graduate, a young lady named Tori Hope Petersen, whose “Dear Hillsdale” letter has gone viral.

“I was one of your ‘token black’ students,” her letter begins. “The essays I wrote on my admissions application spoke about my newly found faith in Christ, experiences as a former foster youth, and adversities faced while growing up with a mentally ill mother. Though my ACT score was not just below your average, but the national average, you accepted me anyways. While other prestigious colleges might have seen me as a high risk statistic, you saw me as an individual with human dignity.”

In a similar vein, the language on Hillsdale’s Mission page is almost eerie in the way it seems to have anticipated the rise of BLM: “The College values the merit of each unique individual, rather than succumbing to the dehumanizing, discriminatory trend of so-called ‘social justice’ and ‘multicultural diversity,’ which judges individuals not as individuals, but as members of a group and which pits one group against other competing groups.”

And what is the purpose of Black Lives Matter if not to pit one group against all others?


If we just had more colleges to stand up to these BULLIES! Thank God for this one.....it’s a start!

Liberty Tree

How about some in Congress taking this stand?

TexaCan Loc: Homeward Bound!

Lack of integrity or kahooonas.......or both? 👿

Liberty Tree

That is a fact!

bahmer

Amen and Amen

TexaCan Loc: Homeward Bound!

Is always a pleasure to see your,

Amen and Amen!

bahmer

I took the constitution course at Hillsdale some years back and it was interesting and I learned quite a bit from it I wish that the liberals on here would take it and smarten up before posting.

TexaCan Loc: Homeward Bound!

I very seldom create a thread, but when I read this one from my Email, I was very impressed! It’s that glimmer of hope that is so needed. Our school system is so polluted with it’s progressive agenda 👿👿👿

Number one and number two of our grandsons are teachers! Their Dad and number three grandson are over all the computers (I don’t know their title) in two different school districts and our daughter is in the School Administration.......so we get the inside story from 4 different school districts. LOL! They are all Conservative Christian Republicans. They are all wonderful examples for children to follow. I am actually their Step Mother/Nanny. I met my beautiful step daughter when she was two years old! I fell in love with her at first sight!

bahmer

Amen and Amen Awesome.👍👍👍👍👍🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

jwrevagent

Found this in the Appleton Post Crescent this Sunday AM. Thought it was an interesting idea. Think it would work?

Final-Five Voting is completely nonpartisan. It is powerful, and it is achievable. The U.S. Constitution gives every state in the country the ability to change these rules.

American politics rewards entrenched interests and career politicians. Innovations in voting could help change that. Here’s a plan.

This is an excerpt from “The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020) Imagine you are a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. You are deliberating over a bill that addresses a critical national challenge that should be handled on a bipartisan basis. As an elected representative, you should consider several seemingly obvious questions: Is this a good idea? Is this the right policy for the country? Is this what the majority of my constituents want?

But as a participant in our current political system, you have only one question to answer: Will I make it through my party’s next primary election if I vote for this?

If the answer to that question is no, and it virtually always is for the tough problems, then the other questions are irrelevant because the rational incentive to get reelected – to keep your job – compels you to vote against this bill.

But perhaps this time you decide to put country over party. You take the risk and publicly endorse the bill’s artful compromise solution. You ignore the pleas of your party leadership. You weather threats and temptations from special interests. And you vote in favor of the bill.

You are in trouble.

For the purposes of your upcoming reelection, it doesn’t matter if the bill passes or not. It doesn’t matter if you are lauded by pundits, good-government reformers, or local constituents for your bipartisan leadership. It doesn’t really matter if the bill is likely to produce good outcomes. What does matter, assuming you want to keep your job, is how your side of the partisan system you just bucked is going to respond.

Here’s where one of the most powerful verbs in American politics comes into play: you’re about to get primaried. In the next party primary election (or partisan primary), a contest for the party’s nomination dominated by special interests and sharply ideological voters, you can expect an überleft challenger if you’re a Democrat and a hard- right opponent if you’re a Republican. You’ll probably lose because rampant unhealthy competition in politics means that for an elected official there is virtually no intersection between acting in the public interest and the likelihood of getting reelected.

In our current system of running for office and legislating, if you do your job the way we need you to, you’re likely to lose your job. Party primaries create an eye of the needle through which no problem-solving politician can pass. This is absurd.

Look at it from another perspective. Suppose you’re not an elected official. Instead, you’re a person who has made a successful career in business, and like the vast majority of citizens across America, you are deeply dissatisfied with Congress. Your success in business comes from your ability to identify opportunities in the marketplace, and when you look at politics, the demand for better options couldn’t be more obvious –particularly in your district, where another lesser- of-two- evils election is just around the corner.

So, ever the entrepreneur, you throw your hat in the ring, perhaps as an independent, or maybe, quite boldly, you launch a startup: a new political party.

In the beginning, the race is promising. Your policy platform and solutions- oriented messaging strikes a chord. Despite your newcomer status, you gain ground quickly. Voters are paying attention to your candidacy, and, at the least, they want to see you on the debate stage. Most of your would-be constituents favor compromise over gridlock, so you pledge to work across the aisle on Capitol Hill.

Perhaps most audaciously, you commit to a positive campaign, eschewing the demonization of your opponents in favor of talking about the issues. Your poll numbers rise. You’re beginning to seem competitive. But there’s a hitch. With your momentum building, local opinion makers, political insiders, and even close friends reach out and implore you: Drop out. Winning is a longshot, they say, and every vote you earn is a vote stolen from a major- party candidate – the candidate you would be resigned to support if you weren’t in the race yourself. If you don’t drop out now, you might spoil the election by stealing the votes that this major- party candidate needs to win. This argument strikes you as deeply unfair.

How could fewer choices – fewer new ideas – be better for voters who are craving other options? The reality of American elections becomes clear: staying in the race might well mean handing a victory to the greater of two evils – the very candidate you were working so hard to defeat in the first place.

You ran for office because you spotted an opportunity to act in the public interest – to deliver solutions ignored by the current players. Your startup campaign was poised to fill a gap in the marketplace. But in American elections, plurality voting – the dominant, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all voting system – creates the spoiler phenomenon and dissuades would-be elected officials like you from running altogether.



Frustrated and amazed by this truly unAmerican abuse of the free market, you do what any good, civic-minded citizen would do: you pursue legal action, believing you have a promising antitrust case. But you are quickly flummoxed yet again. Ever so conveniently, and unlike in most industries, antitrust regulation doesn’t apply to politics – and no independent regulator is coming to the rescue.

Welcome to the politics industry, where party primaries and plurality voting combine to work for special interests and against the public interest. There are few incentives to solve problems. There is little accountability for results. And there are no countervailing forces to restore healthy competition... yet.

Politics Industry Theory shows what’s really driving the system. The rules of the game in any industry affect the way the game is played and the game’s outcomes. The net result of the current rules for our congressional elections – which were written ages ago and are woefully behind the times – is unhealthy competition. The result of unhealthy competition in any industry is, always, that customers (in this case, voters) are not well-served.

So, let’s change the rules.

We propose “Final-Five Voting,” a two-step innovation as follows: h

Step one: Replace party primaries with a single nonpartisan primary in which the top five finishers, regardless of party, advance to the general election. This eliminates the “eye of the needle” conundrum, allowing legislators much more leeway to deliver results in the public interest without constant fear of getting “primaried.” It also creates dynamic competition in the general election with a broader field of candidates and space to debate a diversity of ideas instead of the same- old, binary, wedge issues. h

Step two: Replace single- candidate voting in the general election with “Ranked-Choice Voting,” which allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference. This system eliminates the “spoiler problem,” which is the main barrier to new competition in politics, and – finally – injects accountability into our politics.

Final-Five Voting is a wise investment with a big return: healthy competition that delivers innovation, results and accountability – the best of what we call “free market politics.” Final-Five Voting isn’t designed to force people to abandon their ideological views, or to change who wins; it’s designed to change what the winners are incentivized to do on behalf of the American people.

It may be that many of the same people elected through the current system retain their seats, except that now they are rewarded at the ballot box for reaching across the aisle and taking action primarily with the public interest in mind. Simply put: If they do their jobs the way we need them to, they’re more likely to keep their jobs. Think back to the hypothetical posed at the beginning of this article: Under today’s election rules, you had to vote no on that bill but if you were elected through Final-Five Voting, you are empowered to vote yes.

Final-Five Voting is completely nonpartisan. It is powerful, and it is achievable. The U.S. Constitution gives every state in the country the ability to change these rules.

What are we waiting for?

To learn more and to take action, visit political -innovation.org.

Katherine M. Gehl is a former CEO and business leader, the originator of Politics Industry Theory, and the founder of The Institute for Political Innovation.

Michael E. Porter is a founder of the modern business strategy field, the Bishop William Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business School and the director of the school’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness.


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Katherine M. Gehl and Michael E. Porter Guest Columnists USA TODAY NETWORK - WISCONSIN MERRY ECCLES/USA TODAY NETWORK; GETTY IMAGES


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Lt. Rob Polans ret.

I think it's great, but Hillsdale small? I guess in comparison to some others yes.