TFM—TOTAL FRAT MOVE Or Totally Frightened Men? College Fraternities’ Cowardly Defenders
04/04/2013
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Fresh from disrupting CPAC’s minority pandering plans, Matthew Heimbach and his Towson University White Student Union struck again last week—this time conducting campus safety patrols. Needless to say, the Towson University administration is not amused, harrumphing “we do not encourage the general public to take the law into their own hands for both their personal safety and legal protection.”

Towson claims that crime is down. But the school does send out “crime alerts” which Heimbach reports consistently feature young black males attacking females. [PDF]On Tuesday evening (April 3), Towson President Maravene Loeschke (email her) joined a student government-organized rally against the WSU, causing Heimbach to remark, entirely accurately: "Anything that doesn't fall in the far-left agenda is labeled as either a hate group or extreme." Hundreds of Towson University students walk for unity | Students react in wake of 'White Student Union' nightly patrols,  WBAL-TV, April 3, 2013.

Main Stream Media [MSM] reaction to Heimbach has been hostile, of course. [White Student Union’s plan to patrol the Baltimore area’s Towson University in response to 'black crime wave' sparks controversy, By Victoria Taylor, New York Daily News, March 28, 2013]

One of the more significant came from Total Frat Move, a news/comedy website that glorifies the stereotypical fraternity experience.

TFM reads like a Stuff White People Like for young, conservative, suburban whites, with music, merchandise, advice columns, and humor, all targeted to this specific demographic. It celebrates drinking, wealth, hazing, fratty fashion, Republicans, and most importantly, Kate Upton. (Shown right).

College fraternities are classic Burkean institutions, with as the President of Delta put it in Animal House, a “long tradition of existence to [their] members, and to the community at large.” They incorporate elements of hierarchy, tradition, and initiatic ritual—all anathema to the modern campus mania for endless equality.

In an age when separate men's and women's bathrooms are seen as incipient fascism, fraternities remain a bastion of male identity and exclusivity. Even when unconscious of their own roots, fraternity men proudly claim superiority to the masses. Predictably, most fraternity men lean to the Right. [Colleges, Fraternities, and ‘Natural Conservatives’, By Jordan Bloom, January 28, 2013]

But, surprisingly, TFM posted a smear piece on Matt Heimbach, by one “BlutarskyTFM,” so formulaic and whiny it could have come from Jezebel. [Crazy Towson Students To Patrol Campus For Crime, March 26, 2013] “BlutarskyTFM” moaned that the WSU seems “scary” and appealed to the eminently reliable Southern Poverty Law Center ($PLC to VDARE.com) to prove that the White Student Union is “extreme.”

Highpoint of the piece: BlutarskyTFM’s gloating that soon the headlines will read: “Group of small, intrusive white kids viciously beaten by Towson Football and Basketball Team Members as Cheerleaders Watch and Laugh.”

BlutarskyTFM's white male humiliation fantasies would be par for the course for Jezebel, but TFM depends on a totally different market. Just like The Blaze, Breitbart, or the Daily Caller, TFM is utterly reliant on generating traffic by posting news items about the latest Politically Correct outrage:

These are mixed with jokes that could lead to outright expulsion or severe punishment given the Orwellian speech codes at many American universities.

Feminists hate TFM and its “rape culture.” But the internet is still a liberated zone, and the webzine can continue to be TFTC (“Too Frat To Care”) about its shrill critics. TFM can hardly censor its comments for being “offensive” or “racist”—it would have none left.

But this is not at all the case on America’s campuses. Greek life on American campuses has been in retreat for decades. Fraternity membership declined by as much as 30 percent in the 1990's. College administrators and left-wing activists have allied to drive fraternities off campus.

Some fraternities have been forced to go co-ed, ostensibly to reduce “high-risk” behavior, but in actuality for ideological reasons. Thus Connecticut’s Trinity College President James F. Jones [contact him] admitted that his real concern was breaking apart a “culture of privilege” that reminded him of a “black friend” who “did not feel welcome” in a fraternity when he was at college. [Trinity Seeking To Curb Risky Behavior By Forcing Frats To Go Coed, By Mark Mirko, Hartford Courant, November 26, 2012]

Feminism is another excuse. Following a Civil Rights complaint after the Delta Kappa Epsilon’s fraternity’s lewd chants at Yale University— "No means yes, yes means anal!"—the Obama Administration took a break from suing states that enforce immigration law to launch a federal investigation as to whether Yale was doing enough to combat sexism. [Why Yale Frat Chants Are Not 'Harassing' or 'Threatening',  by Erica Goldberg, TheFire.org, May 19, 2011]

But Yale continues to hold seminars promoting student participation in incest, bestiality, and prostitution, so the federal investigation clearly had more to do with breaking down the Greek system that than protecting the delicate sensibilities of Yale womanhood.

Fraternities are also a popular target for multicultural mau-mauing. Kappa Alpha, which bases its identity on Robert E. Lee, the “epitomy of the Southern Gentleman”, issued a whimpering apology when minority groups protested their “Old South” parties. The national organization also banned individual chapters from using Confederate uniforms. [Southern fraternity banishes Confederate uniforms, Washington Post, April 23, 2010]

And there's the tiresome ritual of various multicultural groups protesting fraternity theme parties they don't like, a phenomenon TFM itself has (ever so cautiously) satirized.

Militant Leftists know their enemy—even if fraternity men don't know themselves. Last month at the University of North Carolina, Chi Psi Fraternity House was vandalized by a self-identified anarchist group which claimed that “All fraternities are sites of conscious self-organization for patriarchal power and the homophobia that supports it.” Just a small extremist group, of course, but the attitude behind is shared by many on campus who would love nothing more than to ban the whole Greek system, if they could. [Anarchists take responsibility for vandalized frat house at UNC,By Scott Greer, CampusReform.org, February 16, 2013]

Who benefits? While fraternities are successfully driven off campus, special housing is provided to multicultural and Leftist activist groups dependent on the administration for resources, funding, and sometimes admittance to the school.

For example:

  • At the College of William & Mary—where the American Greek system actually began—former fraternity housing is now home to an “Africana” house and an “Eco-House” for environmental activists.
  • At Colgate University, fraternities were forced to sell their housing to the administration as part of a larger effort to drive out Greeks—but the school was sure to establish a “Peace Studies” house, a “Harlem Renaissance” house for blacks, and meeting houses for Latinos and Jews.

Such practices are spreading around the country.

Of course, BlutarksyTFM's new friends at the SPLC have an easy explanation for this. They quote one Jack Levin: “Fraternities often appeal to those members of the academic community who feel threatened by diversity.” [Colleges and Universities See Increase in Hate Crimes, Intelligence Report, Spring 2000, Issue Number: 98]

As the SPLC admits, the entire multicultural apparatus on a college campus is designed to break down fraternity rituals “often marked by intolerance.”

But note one important exception—exclusively ethnic fraternities for nonwhites.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, there has been an “explosion of Latino, Asian-American, and multicultural fraternities and sororities, which are joining longstanding black groups.” While college officials are “not worried about ethnic segregation” of ethnically conscious non-whites, they still “say the rise of ethnic fraternities should not stop the mainstream Greeks from stepping up efforts to diversify.”

Hilariously, one college administrator even says that Latino organizations are superior because “In the Latino community, the use and abuse of alcohol is uncommon.” [Ethnic and Multicultural Fraternities Are Booming on Many Campuses, By Leo Reisberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2000] (Except of course when they are driving.)

Needless to say, these multicultural “Greeks” are not exactly part of TFM's market.

Like Conservatism Inc., TFM is reliant on a cultural message of implicit white identity. It dissents against Politically Correct leftism, emphasizes patriotism, and takes refuge in traditional symbols of American culture (including Robert E. Lee). It sells shirts promoting Ronald Reagan and Mitt Romney—all but a declaration of war on a college campus. People who are disgusted with the joke that is American higher education thus look to them as a refuge.

But, like the conservative movement, TFM is hostile to anyone who connects the dots between the institutions it supports and the white people who created them.

BlutarskyTFM is quite capable of sexist jokes or Politically Incorrect cracks about Jews. He even tweets about waving Confederate flags. Like a good conservative though, he later deletes it.

Confederate Blutarsky

While he can't defend fraternities on their own terms, however, BlutarskyTFM can attack anyone who actually does anything about the Leftist hysteria on campus. Though TFM celebrates Greek privilege,BlutarskyTFM knows exactly who really runs this culture and what he can and cannot say.

Like Conservatism Inc., many fraternities are responding with appeasement. At Emerson College, Phi Alpha Tau won support from lefty blogs (which still trashed “Frat boys”) by raising money for their transgender “brother's” sex change operation. Phi Alpha Tau is a communications fraternity, not a “real” social frat, but it was still duly covered by TFM (to the outrage of its commenters, tellingly).

The North-American Interfraternity Conference has condemned “hazing” and joins in the trendy “anti-bullying” campaigns. The country’s largest fraternity, Sigma Phi Epsilon, abolished pledging and forces all of its new chapters to participate in its “Balanced Man” program, meaning most SigEps really don't belong to a fraternity at all.

This parallels the transformation of many large national fraternities into what are essentially charitable organizations and resume boosters, rather than actual traditional institutions. While fraternities do raise millions of dollars every year for various good causes, it can hardly be claimed that this is the primary reason they exist. After all, TFM mocks philanthropy all the time. Nor will this pleading halt their decline.

With even a minuscule amount of courage, fraternity members could halt or even reverse the Leftist offensive that is driving them off campus.

If they don't, they will cease to exist—just like America.

James Kirkpatrick works at a libertarian nonprofit, and is not a GDI.

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