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22 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
.@willwilkinson is one of the better follows on this site. He made a satirical point about the bad faith nature of Biden’s critics, which bad faith actors used as a campaign to get him fired. It hurts the credibility of @NiskanenCenter to go along with such obvious BS.
For all the criticism of campus intolerance, it remains true that espoused academic freedom values are usually enough to give the org leaders the spine not to go along with contrived campaigns to fire employees for speech issues. Not so for most other places of work.
You can read the background, including Will’s explanation and apology here. Did a single person who actually think this was a serious call to violence?
I’ve been v. skeptical abt cancel culture claims but it absolutely is the case that social media amplifies risks by allowing poorly judged comments to be used as fodder for a visible online campaign that orgs respond to more than they would if it were a letter from a crank.

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More from @donmoyn

Don Moynihan Profile picture
23 Jan
A number of Trump appointees have tried to burrow into long-term public service jobs. Biden is firing them, which right wing commentators are trying paint as politicization. The reality is that this is correcting a Trump-era pattern of deprofessionalization. 1/ Image
Lets step back to general principles here: political appointees selected on the basis of ideology are expected to resign when a new President comes into power. Career officials stay. For some positions its a little more complex but that is the basic governing logic. 2/
Trump blurred these basic differences between appointees and career staff. He ran out of time in his effort to turn potentially hundreds of thousands of career officials into appointees, and Biden reversed that policy. A good step to protect competence. 3/ washingtonpost.com/politics/biden…
Read 11 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
22 Jan
As David Brooks suggests that academia is a "less vicious" equivalent to white supremacy, just want to point out he was a Yale fellow for six years (where he taught a course on humility!) and pulls down speakings fees from universities that are equivalent to many faculty salaries Image
David Brooks draws on academia more than most columnists - social science, moral philosophy. He also has written about the deep value of universities to their community. But he is addicted to the causal wide swipes at faculty where to retain his conservative bona fides.
For example, there has been a long conservative critique of the humanities as essentially useless. Brooks, who draws on the humanities a lot, rather than defends it, argues that it has simply become to woke.
Read 5 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
21 Jan
We are 2 weeks from a guy wearing a Camp Auschwitz hoodie storming the Capitol, and even Trump's DHS labeled white supremacists as our biggest domestic threat.

But by mentioning white supremacy Biden is "divisive" and attacking whites.
Welcome to the next 4 years of gaslighting.
If a guy spends 20 minutes saying we are good people, we need unity and then says, "but we can't tolerate white supremacists" and your response is to be offended, then maybe the problem is with you.
Good summary of the bad faith media effort trying to persuade all whites that Biden's criticism of white supremacy is actually an attack on them. Via @pbump washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
18 Jan
This is not the first time that student surveys have been used to create exaggerated fears that students are opposed to free speech, and the liberal students are the worst transgressors. If you have story to tell, its not hard to get the numbers to line up with it.
The truth of it is that most of us are not survey method experts, and even those who are are not going to dig into the methods. We just look at the headlines framed by the authors. So its all the more important to do it right. Prior example (thread).
One technique used in both the Thompson Center & RealClear Politics/Fire survey to exaggerate liberal intolerance is to use questions about issues which liberals are more sensitive toward, but not having a equivalent set of questions that would draw out conservative students.
Read 8 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
18 Jan
It's MLK Day, the day in America when politicians who absolutely would have opposed Martin Luther King Jr. quote him to cast a sheen of legitimacy on their causes.
MLK Day is also the day when people say they are inspired by MLK Jr., despite undermining his legacy.

Left: MLK Jr. at the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Right: The person most responsible for blocking a restoration of VRA, refusing to even give it a vote in the Senate.
MLK Day is the day when people like Ted Cruz seek to repurpose MLK Jr., pretending that a man who led protests and argued for radical notions of social equality is actually a conservative hero, alongside Churchill and Reagan.
Read 9 tweets
Don Moynihan Profile picture
17 Jan
The most striking thing about looking back on the attack of a professor who correctly identified the threat of a Trump Presidency is that those making the attacks still don’t think they did anything wrong and see themselves as victims.
By way of background, Ken is a friend and co-author. He tagged me b/c I blogged & tweeted about what happened at the time as an example of the ecosystem of right wing attacks on academia
this piece @HdxAcademy: heterodoxacademy.org/blog/academic-…
& thread:
.@KellyMeyerhofer, a Madison reporter did something I was always tempted to do: she went back to those who drove the attack on the faculty. Rep. Dave Murphy, and a student who had worked in Paul Ryans office. madison.com/wsj/news/local…
Read 8 tweets

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