Power Line’s Inauguration Liberal Beclowning Contest

There’s an old joke about what happens when you cross a postmodernist academic and the Godfather: You get an offer you can’t understand. To which might be added today, who needs Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, about to close after 146 years, when you’ve got liberals beclowning themselves nonstop for free. (I suspect there’s a connection between these two things.)

This comes to mind with today’s story about what is the most hilarious planned liberal protest against Trump on inauguration day. I’ll just let Inside Higher Ed tell you without embellishment:

Anthropologists and other scholars plan read-in of Michel Foucault to mark inauguration of Donald Trump

. . . Anthropologists are taking a different approach. They are planning events that day in which people — together at locations across the country or virtually connected — will read and discuss a lecture presented by Michel Foucault, the late philosopher, as part of a series he gave at the Collège de France. The lectures have been published as a book, Society Must Be Defended. The read-in idea is being backed not only by the scholars who have organized the events but by the popular anthropology blog Savage Minds and the journals American AnthropologistAmerican EthnologistCultural Anthropology and Environment and Society. . . The scholars are Paige West, the Claire Tow Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College and Columbia University, and JC Salyer, term professor of practice at Barnard. . .

This paragraph is especially amusing if you let it sink in:

In their blog post, they note that many scholars have, since the election, suggested that it’s time for intellectuals to change the way they act and engage with the public. The idea, which West and Salyer reject, “is that scholars need to somehow change what they are doing, and how they are doing it, in order to face this seemingly new political reality in the Unites States.

If you’re a leftist academic, of course you wouldn’t want to “change what you’re doing” on campus because you’d be unemployed in 15 minutes once everyone figured it out. Better to maintain irrelevance through jargon and nurse your bitterness toward our world than engage issues in a meaningful way.

Which is ironically confirmed by the last line in the story:

Asked if they had any fears that supporters of Trump would mock their activity, they said, “No, of course not.”

Anyway, the Foucault read-in is my candidate for most absurd anti-Trump inauguration effort at the moment, but we invite Power Line readers to watch closely and report in, perhaps offering a Super Green Weenie Award to someone. I’ll be on the road in Texas this weekend (more about that later), but I’ll try to report on the Great Liberal Beclowning of 2017. Meanwhile:

Five Days

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