Ivanka Trump's commencement speech was canceled because social justice is a disease
by Eddie Scarry | June 05, 2020 05:02 PM
Academia is where the absolute horror called “social justice” multiplies, so it was only predictable that White House adviser Ivanka Trump, daughter of the president, would be the latest casualty of that sick ideology.
A commencement address previously recorded by Trump was set to air Saturday at Wichita State Tech’s graduation ceremony in Kansas. She had been invited back in February to deliver some remarks, but on Thursday, an assistant professor at Wichita State University, the tech school’s parent campus, wrote a whiny letter to faculty about how “horrified and disgusted” she was by Trump’s scheduled appearance.
The letter, written by Jennifer Ray, complained that as an administration official, Trump was complicit in the president’s supposedly “callous disregard of the concerns of black people, immigrants, and Latinx people.”
Mind you, Trump’s speech for the commencement had been recorded in mid-May due to the logistical complications caused by the coronavirus, according to the White House. This was well before the combustible national protests over the death of George Floyd.
But after the letter penned by Ray, a woman who isn’t involved with the tech school, Wichita State Tech President Sheree Utash decided to cancel Trump’s speech.
"In light of the social justice issues brought forth by George Floyd’s death, I understand and take responsibility that the timing of the announcement was insensitive,” Utash said in a statement on Thursday. “For this, I’m sorry. That was never the intent, and I want you to know I have heard you and we are responding.”
It’s stunning. Utash had been the one to invite Trump in the first place. “From my work with Ms. Trump, serving on the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board over this last year,” she said at the time, “I know how passionate she is about reshaping the United States’ education and job-training landscape."
Passion for job training and for those without a four-year degree appears to get you only so far.
Whatever you think of Ivanka Trump, it was, at minimum, a meaningful gesture for a senior White House official (who also happens to be a celebrity) to devote time to a community college in Kansas rather than to the usual places that get that kind of attention.
And what did Ray and Utash think Trump was going to say? "All Lives Matter"?
No, her prepared remarks for the commencement were entirely apolitical and intended to celebrate the achievements of the graduating class, most of which hope to get jobs in very important fields that are often overlooked.
“In this graduating class,” Trump would have said, according to remarks I obtained from the White House, “are men and women who can run an assembly line, build a field hospital, police our communities, respond to emergencies, keep America connected through internet and phones, care for our senior citizens and our most vulnerable patients, use 3D printers to make medical equipment, draw blood to save lives — and so many other essential services during this time.”
She would acknowledge the “hundreds of distilleries” that started pumping out hand sanitizer when it was in short supply and needed most and the manufacturing plants that “converted factory floors to produce millions of masks and gowns” and hurried to produce new ventilators.
She would have said that “our nation is beating back the virus through the strength and skill, muscle and might of the American Worker.”
But the president posed for a photo op! How dare his daughter speak?
The social justice mob, with people such as Jennifer Ray, is why tech schools can’t have nice things.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/ivanka-trumps-commencement-speech-was-canceled-because-social-justice-is-a-disease