Thread by @keikoinboston

1. There is an email circulating that was purportedly written by a history prof at UC Berkeley that rails against Black Lives Matter and the current antiracist fever in the US.

I would urge caution. Nothing about the author has been confirmed and I see a lot of red flags.

2. UC Berkeley’s Department of History:

"We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member."

archive.is/kP4Rk

3. In this thread I will go over what we know about the origin of the letter and do some analysis and fact checking.

I will refer to the document as a “letter” or “email” and take the personal details mostly at face value for the purposes of discussion.

4. Some possibilities:

A. Letter is real (sent to profs at UC Berkeley)
- author is who they are purported to be
- author is a UC Berkeley affiliate but not a professor
- author is not at UC Berkeley

B. Letter is fake (just a document not sent to anyone)

5. I will not tag any accounts in this thread in an effort to reduce harassment, although I have included some direct links to tweets.

If I see anyone tagging to harass, you will be blocked. I’ve written this thread for informational purposes, not to incite a mob.

6. I’m a bit disappointed that just a few months after we saw many COVID-19 hoax claims being posted to social media and attributed to doctors at famous institutions that people would be so uncritical about this supposed open letter.

7. It’s certainly possible that the letter was written by someone at UC Berkeley but if it was not, the author is doing the same thing as COVID-19 hoaxers—trying to use the authority of UC Berkeley and of professorship to give credibility to their words.

8. If this were a random Reddit post would it have gotten as much attention? Probably not.

9. I’m not sure if it’s fair to label this churnalism but so far I haven’t found any original reporting on the letter, just people sharing what originally came from a 6/10/20 anonymous (now remove), 2,457 word Pastebin post that was “Untitled” and posted by “A GUEST”. Links ↓

10.

6/11/20 Archive of 6/10/20 Pastebin Untitled post containing ”UC Berkeley History Professor's Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy": archive.is/bzTpa

6/14/20 Archive of removed post error: archive.vn/vWRnQ

11. Pastebin is a website that allows users to share large blocks of text. It was originally used by coders in the 1990s as a way not to interrupt IRC (Internet relay chat) conversations with large chunks of code.

12. Since then, some people have used Pastebin to anonymously share data breaches and text from documents. Pastebin is not the same as a document sharing platform like Dropbox or Box. Users may only copy and paste text to the site.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastebin

13. Pastebin posts may be edited. Users can set them to expire "never" or anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 month from posting.

14. Releasing an email by copying and pasting it into a Pastebin post is a non-standard way of releasing an email.

15. While screenshots and pdfs of emails can be faked or manipulated, typically if a news organization is going to release an email, one of these two methods will be used. Names and email addresses may or may not be redacted.

16. There is no header information in the Pastebin post so we don’t know:
- name and email address of sender
- names and email addresses of recipients
- date and time the email was sent
- subject line

We also don’t know what documents were attached.

17. What can we glean about the author from the letter?

18. The writer purports to be a black academic within the UC Berkeley Department of History with a personal history of black on black trauma. I would label their politics as conservative. The writer is most likely British-educated. Screenshots below.

19. The title in the Pastebin post labels the writer as a “UC Berkeley History Professor” but the body of the letter says only “I am one of your colleagues…”. The writer also refers to “our department”.

20. The writer expresses deep concern for present and future employment which to me reads as a person earlier in their career. There are two mentions of “all future jobs in my field” which suggests a lack of tenure.

21. The author writes about black on black crime, mentions a history of such trauma— “My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd”—and deploys other narratives more popular with conservatives, including railing against Democrats & Joe Biden.

22. When I was doing the word analysis I realized that the writer used the British English spellings of “organisation” and “grovelling”.

In American English, we spell them “organization” and “groveling”.

This seems to indicate the writer is British-educated.

23. I typically show my work but as I don’t want to drag in the names of random people in the UC Berkeley Department of History, I will not be linking or sharing screenshots. Readers can look this up for themselves.

24. After I read the letter I checked the faculty page for UC Berkeley’s Department of History. I counted 44 faculty members.

- Only 3 are visibly black—7% of the department
- 2 professors are African American
- 1 professor is from Kenya

25. 2 of 3 black faculty are 30+ years into their careers.

26. If the author were truly a professor afraid for their current & future employment there is no way they would publish this letter with the name of their institution attached where it’s so easy to narrow down the possible authors to 3 professors based on race.

27. One possibility is that the author is a graduate student (there are 113) employed as a teaching or research assistant, but I’m not sure most grad students would identify themselves as “a colleague” of professors. Would probably depend on the department culture.

28. There are 11 visiting scholars, none of whom are visibly black.

29. We can probably assume that the author is not an emeritus professor because of the concerns about their current and future employment.

30. The writer identifies as a “person of color” but does not use the identity labels “black” or “African American” for themself.

31. To some that could indicate a non-black POC but they write about “the plight of my people” and “a whole generation of black children” so that indicates the writer is claiming to be black.

32. George Floyd is mentioned 7 times in the letter with two paragraphs devoted to a rant about how the department, the media, and the public having lionized him in death, when the writer believes that as “a multiple felon”, he is unworthy of secular canonization.

33. The claim that Floyd “once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach,” is partially false.

34. Snopes wrote an article debunking a meme that used another women’s photo to spread this misinformation.
snopes.com/fact-check/is-…
archive.vn/JwGhl

35. The Snopes fact check was published on 6/12/20, two days after the letter was posted. Not sure if other fact checks were available at the time the letter was written.

36. KARE 11 reported that the home invasion and gun to the abdomen did happen, although Snopes wrote that “the police report says the injuries were inflicted by another man, not Floyd”.

kare11.com/article/news/l…
archive.vn/fcKgy

37. I’m not going to go over the other claims, but you can read more about Floyd’s criminal history in the KARE 11 article in previous tweet and here:

snopes.com/news/2020/06/1…
archive.vn/miyyA

38. The George-Floyd-as-bad-martyr-and-home-invader narrative went really viral after President Trump retweeted this clip of Glenn Beck and Candace Owens. Owens tells the home invasion story w/ false detail of woman being pregnant.

archive.vn/gcmz1

https://twitter.com/glennbeck/status/1268360824571277312

39. Sources for Trump’s retweet:

1. thedailybeast.com/donald-trump-r…
archive.is/vbSNW

2. glennbeck.com/trump-retweets…
archive.vn/w6XyB

40. Wilfred Reilly has confirmed receiving the email but “can't prove whether or not the sender is who he claims to be.”

L: 6/12/20
archive.vn/PfiBq

R: 6/13/20
archive.vn/4wV1s

41. Reilly, an asst prof of political science at Kentucky State University, and author of "Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War”, is named in the letter and says he was copied on the original.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_R…

42. Reilly has not released any screenshots of the email, nor revealed the identities of the three UC Berkeley faculty the email was supposedly addressed to.

43. Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow of public policy at the Hoover Institute, is also named in the email. We haven’t heard from him and I would be surprised if we do. Sowell rarely speaks to the media & does not have a social media presence.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_So…

44. The letter fails to mention 2 black academics who've been writing about & discussing these issues publicly for years & whose work is more accessible to a non-conservative audience:

- Glenn Loury, economist at Brown University
- John McWhorter, linguist at Columbia University

45. Loury and McWhorter have been commenting on black social issues separately and together in their decade+ long conversation on Loury’s podcast “The Glenn Show”.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Lou…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McWh…

46. How did the letter spread online?

I missed the early spread of the letter on social media so can’t comment on that.

This section will discuss the spread on 4 websites—Medium, Zero Hedge, UncoverDC, and Citizen Free Press. Links below.

47.

Medium:
medium.com/@soumynona_/an…
archive.is/v2WMi

Zero Hedge:
zerohedge.com/political/anon…
archive.vn/ZAw5B

UncoverDC:
uncoverdc.com/2020/06/12/uc-…
archive.is/GTpjC

Citizen Free Press:
citizenfreepress.com/breaking/anony…
archive.vn/qyT19

48. I retrieved timestamps for publication from the page source of currently live pages and one archive. Dates/times listed below are my local time—EDT.

49.

6/11/20 7:16pm

From what I could find it appears that the letter went very viral when UncoverDC Editor-in-Chief Tracy Beanz tweeted the text of the letter in a lengthy Twitter thread, linking the Pastebin post at the end.

https://twitter.com/tracybeanz/status/1271219776606687233

50.

6/12/20 3:31am

A Medium account with only one other post, posted the letter without any indication of the source, making it appear that this was their writing. Is this the mystery professor? We don’t know. Soumynona does not appear to have posted any recent responses.

51. There is now a splash page on the post that says "The following content was reported as a potential violation of Medium’s rules and is under investigation."

52.

6/12/20 1:05pm

The pseudonymous “Tyler Durden”, (a character in the film Fight Club - background here: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…) published the letter on the Zero Hedge blog. Current live timestamp appears to correspond with the update on 6/13/20.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Hedge

53. 6/12/20 1:05pm timestamp via page source from this archive:

web.archive.org/web/2020061217…

54.

6/12/20 1:19pm

After the Pastebin post was removed, Beanz published the letter on UncoverDC with the same title from the Pastebin post and this note.

55.

6/13/20 4:38 pm

The next day, pseudonymous founder, “[Citizen] Kane”, published the letter on the Citizen Free Press blog. (Background: washingtonexaminer.com/washington-sec…)

56. Citizen Free Press copied & pasted text from Zero Hedge without attribution and added a cartoon, Reilly’s tweet, and an interview with Reilly under the letter.

57. Here’s how UncoverDC, Zero Hedge and Citizen Free Press framed Reilly’s 6/12/20 confirmation.

As of right now, none have posted an update with Reilly clarification tweet from yesterday.

58. Uncover DC:

“Wilfred Reily [sic], mentioned in the letter alongside Thomas Sowell, retweeted my original tweet confirming that he personally received the email, thus verifying its credibility.”

59. Reilly "confirming that he personally received the email” from an anonymous source in no way verifies its credibility.

All it confirms is that Reilly received a letter from an anonymous person claiming to be employed in the UC Berkeley Department of History.

60. I was not able to find anything that indicates that Reilly, Beanz/UncoverDC, Zero Hedge, or Citizen Free Press have independently verified the claimed identity of the author as a UC Berkeley professor.

61. I tried to check NewsGuard’s credibility ratings for these sites. Only Zero Hedge has been rated.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsGuard

1: UncoverDC’s rating is in process
2: Zero Hedge
3: Citizen Free Press has not been rated

62. I rate the chances that this document was written by a UC Berkeley professor in the Department of History as extremely low, although if you see new information, please send it to me. My DMs are open if you don’t want to tweet. I will update this thread.

63. The letter may have been written by a UC Berkeley affiliate but unless that person comes forward and takes responsibility for the letter, we’ll never know.

64. Even though there are some valid points in the letter, the language used and some of the references chosen make this read to me like partisan propaganda.

65. The Pastebin post frames the letter as being: “UC Berkeley History Professor's Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy”.

66. Selected word counts via:
writewords.org.uk/word_count.asp

10 blm
1 blm’s

6 police
1 brutality

6 floyd
1 floyd's

7 democrat
2 democratic
1 democrats

2 biden
1 biden's

67. A Cirrus (word cloud) created with Voyant Tools.
voyant-tools.org/?corpus=19cc6d…

68. People have been questioning why the history department isn’t grappling with the contents of the letter. Why should they? From a PR perspective this makes no sense. If they don’t have any belief it came from one of their faculty, there is no incentive for them to engage.

69. An anonymous Pastebin post is not newsworthy. Even the College Fix and Campus Reform who often break higher ed controversy stories haven’t touched this one.

70. Anyone could have written the letter. I could write an open letter today identifying myself as a Latinx small business owner whose business was destroyed in the Minneapolis riots, saying I don’t support BLM, and post it to Pastebin.

71. Questions readers should have asked from the beginning. This is what went through my mind while I read the letter.

Is the author even black?
Are they really a professor?
Are they at UC Berkeley?
Are they in the history department?
Why is there false info in the letter?

72.

Why is the letter so partisan?
What’s up with the emotional manipulation?
Why only mention Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly?

73. When these basic questions cannot be answered it’s not clear how seriously the letter should be taken.

If people agree with some or all of it, this isn’t a source they should be citing. Using a potential hoax letter undermines the integrity of the conversation.

74. There are enough black contrarian thinkers speaking and writing under their own names so that we can discuss these ideas in the open without having to use writing from anonymous sources.

75. Here are some recent articles and podcasts from people speaking & writing under their own names.

76. English translation of an interview w/ Glenn Loury first published in the Swiss Neue Zuercher Zeitung.

“Racism is an Empty Thesis: An African-American professor says that blacks hold their fate in their own hands."

Archive: archive.vn/zFnyl

https://twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/1271202187075608577

77. Lesen Sie Glenn Lourys 6/6/20 Interview auf Deutsch.

archive.vn/vDGuk
nzz.ch/international/…

78. John McWhorter in Quillette on 6/11/20.

"Racist Police Violence Reconsidered"

Archive: archive.vn/MH8LY

https://twitter.com/JohnHMcWhorter/status/1271249478473916416

79. Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, in City Journal, where he is a contributing editor, published today:

"Stories and Data: Reflections on race, riots, and police”

Archive: archive.is/ej7FQ

https://twitter.com/coldxman/status/1272266486141378562

80. If you prefer audio/video, here is Loury & McWhorter’s most recent conversation:

81. Loury, McWhorter, Hughes, Thomas Chatterton Williams w/ host Kmele on The Fifth Column podcast recorded on 5/22/20, published 6/1/20.

"On Anti-Racism" (Part II)

wethefifth.com/episodes/188-a…

82. This is a follow up to “On Anti Racism” released on 11/22/18.

wethefifth.com/episodes/121

83. Chloé Valdary in conversation with Benjamin Boyce, released 6/3/20.

"Collective Guilt, Common Pride"