Thread by @JMichaelWaller

Georgetown University "educates" more of our diplomats, intelligence officers and analysts, and other national security professionals than just about any place around. Here's a look at who's teaching them. quillette.com/2021/04/09/geo…

To my Chinese friends - I didn't have space to include the fact that @Georgetown is heavily dependent on cash from Chinese Communist Party-related sources.

Georgetown Law Professor Lama Abu Odeh, of the "Gender Justice Initiative," makes important comments in her "Georgetown's Cultural Revolution" article.

Contemplate how terrible things are at @Georgetown when people like Professor Odeh speak out. genderjustice.georgetown.edu/lama-abu-odeh/#

1) Odeh: "the dean acted by first referring the culprit professors to the university’s Equity and Diversity Committee for investigation and then ... he terminated Professor Sellers’s contract."

2) Odeh: The other @Georgetown professor "was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation by the Diversity Committee, which will also investigate whether the professors’ alleged bias affected the grades they gave their students. He later resigned."

3) Odeh: "Quickly and on cue" came a letter demanding professors of a certain race to "acknowledge responsibility...to engage in the constant work of examining and revising [their] own flawed premises."

4) Odeh: "Close to every member of Georgetown Law’s non-black faculty (and others) signed the letter."

"I, and a few others, withheld our signatures.... two white professors of the boomer generation with plenty of progressive credentials pushed back."

5) Odeh: "One ... worried about the precedent of firing a professor for expressing her views to a colleague in what she had good reason to think was a private conversation, especially as this firing was in violation of Georgetown’s policies...."

6) Odeh: "The other professor who pushed back... expressed sorrow for the destruction of the career of Professor Sellers without due process and insisted that structural racism would not be cured by diversity training...."

9) Odeh: "The silence to [creative remedies] ... speaks of the lack of resources within progressive thinking that could be drawn upon to resist the trend that has bedeviled American academia over the past few years."

10) Odeh: "The academy is a different place today than it was only a year ago and was different a year ago than it was five years before.

"Terror and dread fill academic workers, professors, and staff alike, and it is everywhere."

11) Odeh: "What they beget...is a combination of dread & virtuous self-congratulation. These two sentiments, dread married to virtue, constitute...the affective embodiment of progressive ideology prevalent among white liberals as developed in its most privileged space: academia."

12) Odeh: "Progressive liberals are blind to the fact that there is a regime take-over apace everywhere in academic institutions. A new ruling elite is taking over academic institutions by using its 'minority status' to exercise a 'soft' coup...."

13) "... and is appealing to the minoritarianism of progressive ideology to legitimize its coup—or, if you like, to 'manufacture consent.' I will call the adherents of this ideology the 'progressoriat.'"

14) Odeh: "The position of the progressoriat in relation to this coup is akin to that of communist activists in relation to a communist takeover. At first they see it as representing what they always fought for; then with time ..."

15) "... they find themselves having to decide whether its first atrocity is to be criticized or understood as necessary; then, when the next atrocity takes place, they feel they must tolerate it because they didn’t object to the first atrocity and, before long ..."

16) "... a time comes when any objection can only be made at a huge cost to themselves. The unfolding history of the new coup is being written every day across the domain of academic institutions in the US as the ..."

17) "... progressoriat watch muffled, hesitant objecting in private, and then, when someone makes their reservations public, finding themselves at risk of being suspended or losing their jobs."

18) Odeh: "The new elite taking over academic institutions has at its disposal an arsenal of tools to perpetuate its rule. It not only postures as representative of others in the way communists did—"

19) "- the 'intelligentsia' representing the worker or the peasant in the latter’s case and representing victim groups in the former’s. The new elite can also represent itself as victims, an opportunity even communists would have balked at."

20) Odeh: "Members of the new elite have no hesitation at weaponizing their feelings, silencing opponents by claiming they’ve offended them."

21) Odeh: "In this way, the new power elite can present itself as being victims, as well as representing victims.... it has the power to make itself The Cause. This is why the insistence on the ubiquity of unconscious bias is important..."

22) "... it allows the new elite to consolidate their status by continually self-referencing as victims.

"Bias being everywhere means that the new ruling class, in spite of having seized power, can continue to present themselves as being oppressed."

23) Odeh "By constantly claiming to be offended, triggering Pavlovian apologies & vows to 'do better' from the progressoriat, who appear to have endless reservoirs of self-abnegation, the new elite establishes rituals that renew its rule and solicit ongoing consent to this rule."

24) Odeh: "A colleague of mine commented that I was wasting precious victimhood resources by refusing to sign the statement by non black faculty: Muslim, Palestinian, woman, dadidadida. This is the cleverness of minoritarian rule..."

25) Odeh "This is the cleverness of minoritarian rule: a coalition of minorities that, collectively, form a majority but that is nevertheless always able to invoke its minoritatian status to preserve its power. Power is presented as the absence of power to preserve actual power."

26) Odeh: "The progressoriat are unable to talk about their impending demise because they have already used their own institutional power over decades to drive away conservatives."

"They turned their academic institution into a partisan echo chamber."

27) Odeh: "Residing in an echo chamber only increases your moral certitude. Now they are being given a taste of their own brutal medicine.

"Meantime, the new elite is acting ruthlessly and impatiently and is only happy with declarations of complete submission.

28) Odeh: "No hesitation or nuance is allowed: nothing but unequivocal loyalty oaths. The progressoriat can only repeat, 'I believe in the cause. I believe. I believe. Believe me I believe.'

"If this echoes a Maoist take-over, that’s because it is."

29) Odeh: It "is part of a more general phenomenon of the rise of the technocrats who have found a home in the Democratic Party so that academic institutions ... are now the direct and unmediated suppliers of a political class whose educated credentials are its claim to rule."

@threadreaderapp unroll