RUSH: There are a couple of stories here that, in the old days we would do these and have a great yuk and a great laugh about them, thinking everybody else would also find them funny and laughable, not realizing that a decent size of the population would be identifying with the subject matter and angered by it or in support of it. 

So we haven’t stopped reporting this kind of stuff, but I have changed my attitude about it, realizing now that a decent number of people who hear it are going to not think it’s funny, that they’re either gonna agree with it or think it’s very serious.  The story is from PJ Media by Tom Knighton.  And here’s the headline:  “Spoiled College Grad Demands New Dress Code at Job, Gets the Boot.”

This is about a kid who got an internship at a company, he shows up and he and his fellow interns decide that they don’t like the dress code at this company. So they demand a change in the dress code because they’re spoiled rotten little children and that’s all they’ve had to do to get whatever they want growing up, demand and then cry, bellyache, caterwaul, and make a general nuisance.  We must not harm their self-esteem. We can’t say no to little Johnny, so whatever little Johnny wants or little Susie wants, they’ve ended up getting. 

Now, as an intern anywhere, it would never even occur to me to issue a demand about anything.  I wouldn’t want to jeopardize the opportunity I had just been given, even in an internship.  I worked at the radio station in my hometown, I went as often as I could without being paid for a year.  The last thing I was gonna do was tell ’em what they needed to change.  But that was then and this is now. 

“College kids have a pretty easy time getting their way on campus. Just make enough of a stink and the universities cave,” and you know it to be true, folks. “Unfortunately, these students eventually reach a little place called the real world, where things aren’t so forgiving. One recently wrote in to an advice columnist because the antics he’d gotten away with elsewhere suddenly didn’t work.” We’ll call this kid Junior. “Junior was at his internship, and he wanted the company to have a more lax dress code.” He didn’t like that they had to show up in a tie and maybe a jacket.  He wanted T-shirts, cutoffs.  He wanted to be able to dress the way he wanted to dress. 

In addition, he and his fellow interns noticed one of the regular staff wearing shoes that were not precisely in line with the standard dress code, and he thought, “Well, that’s not right.  They can get away with violating the dress code.  His shoes didn’t quite match.” 

So this individual got together with his fellow interns and wrote up a proposal for an alternate dress code accompanied with a petition.  So here you are running the division where this intern happens to be working, and all of a sudden you get a petition and a list of demands about the dress code.  Well, here’s what happened.  This is actually from the intern who wrote to the advice columnist. 

“The next day, all of us who signed the petition were called into a meeting where we thought our proposal would be discussed. Instead, we were informed that due to our ‘unprofessional’ behavior, we were being let go from our internships. We were told to hand in our ID badges and to gather our things and leave the property ASAP.

“We were shocked. The proposal was written professionally like examples I have learned about in school, and our arguments were thought out and well-reasoned. We weren’t even given a chance to discuss it. The worst part is that just before the meeting ended, one of the managers told us that the worker who was allowed to disobey the dress code was a former soldier who lost her leg and was therefore given permission to wear whatever kind of shoes she could walk in. You can’t even tell, and if we had known about this we would have factored it into our argument.”

“The reality is that colleges — the educational institutions that are theoretically supposed to prepare these kids for the real world — don’t.”  They do all of these students a disservice by cowering to every silly, childish demand that is made. All this safe space stuff, micro-aggression stuff, and then when these students hit the real world, you know, it’s like, “Pow!”  Except not everywhere.  There are some places in the real world where they would have been successful.  Probably a solar firm with relationship to Obama or some other government sponsored waste of time and money. 

But that’s what happened here.  Old Junior decided that the interns should dictate what the dress code was gonna be at this company.  And make no mistake, a petition is indicative of a desire to dictate. You don’t petition things expressing your desires.  You do a petition because you’re trying to bully. You are trying to use the show of force to intimidate the recipients of your petition into doing what you want.  You are trying to dictate.  That’s what the purpose of a petition is. 

And, by the way, if that offends you, I’m sorry.  I know a lot of you, “We’re gonna do a petition. It’s the way we’re showing our civil disobedience.  It’s the way we’re showing our unity.”  No, it isn’t.  You’re bullies.  It’s the way you’re trying to dictate.  You think there’s power in numbers.  Make no mistake about that, folks, a petition — I realize it’s offending many of you because many of you have probably signed a lot of them, but they are an attempt to dictate, in this case, how the company’s dress code should work. 

After all, where’d these kids learn to do this?  They learned it at home.  They learned it in school.  All they had to do was show force in numbers and act like spoiled little kids and they got what they wanted.  They learned to pressure authority this way in college, right?  What Junior and his fellow interns found out, and I don’t even know if they learned this lesson, but you know what they found out? 

They were unnecessary.  They were interns.  They had no experience.  They weren’t God’s gift to anything.  They weren’t God’s gift to anybody.  They weren’t even needed, much less in demand.  They weren’t even considered assets.  An intern program is generally one of these feel-good things you do to make the company look good, and occasionally you find a diamond in the rough.  They weren’t even needed.  They’re a dime a dozen.  If a group of interns is unhappy with the dress code and decides to leave, it is not a problem to fill the job with somebody who wants it, and not just in the case of interns; in many paid jobs that’s the rule of thumb. 

So the company was doing them a favor offering them an internship, and they basically just spit all over it, and you wonder if they’ve learned the lesson or if they’re running around thinking that the world’s an unfair place, this is an example of how unfair it is, how oppressive it is.  This is why we need a big government to control people. Why you need a big government to make these corporations do what we want them to do.  Little liberals, even though they may not have known it, in action. 

And get this from the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Headline:  “Why Police Were Called to a South Jersey Third-Grade Class Party. — On June 16th,” two weeks ago, “police were called to an unlikely scene:  An end-of-the-year class party at the William Tatem Elementary School in Collingswood.  A third grader had made a comment about the brownies being served to the classes.  After another student claimed that that remark was ‘racist,’ the school called the Collingswood police department, according to the mother of the boy who made the comment.  The police officer spoke to the student, who is nine, said the boy’s mother, Stacy dos Santos, and local authorities. Dos Santos said that the school overreacted and that her son made a comment about snacks.”

They were serving brownies on the last day of school, so the kid’s talking about brownies.  And some other student says, “That’s a racist comment.  He’s talking about fellow classmates as brownies,” and they call the cops, and the cops showed up. 

“The boy’s father was contacted by Collingswood police later in the day. Police said the incident had been referred to the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency. The student stayed home for his last day of third grade. Dos Santos said that her son was ‘traumatized,’ and that she hopes to send him to a different Collingswood public school in the fall.

“And she wants an apology. She said she graduated from Collingswood High School and has two other children, a 21-year-old who also went through Collingswood schools, and a 3-year-old. Her husband, the third grader’s father, is Brazilian, dos Santos said.”  So he couldn’t possibly be racist, right?  “The incident, which has sparked outrage among some parents, was one of several in the last month when Collingswood police have been called to look into school incidents that parents think hardly merit criminal investigation.”

Who in their right mind would think this would ever merit criminal investigation?  But it did.  They were serving brownies.  A kid talks about the brownies, another kid, “That’s racist.”  And they called the cops.  That’s worse than in Port St. Lucie when they ran out of McNuggets at McDonald’s some babe called 911 hoping to reach Obama to complain about it.