What I'd add to Jon's thread is that the last decade has seen an intensification of the use of populist frames to denigrate people working in higher education which is having real policy effects. Perfectly easy to make your criticism of higher ed without using that framing.
Not saying Carville wants to destroy universities - he works at two of them! But saying things like "people in faculty lounges in fancy colleges use a different language than ordinary people" furthers a narrative that is being used to attack univerities.
I've worked in higher ed for 20 years and there has never been a more hostile period. If you work in a public university in a red state there are real efforts to censor speech *using the framing Carville articulated.* This stuff matters. medium.com/arc-digital/th…
You want to make fair criticism of higher ed? Go ahead. That is the majority of academic twitter! You want to echo the lazy tropes of those who see the university as their enemy, expect some pushback.
Yeah: one might even suggest that that the full policy consequences of moral panics about wokeness or cancel culture in elite private spaces like Oberlin or Harvard are visited upon public higher ed in red state institutions
Definitely seems like Roger Stone, currently being investigated for tax evasion, was planning to take $250K in bitcoin to help someone get a pardon for having sex with a minor. Bitcoin being the preferred currency for people who report their taxes. thedailybeast.com/joel-greenberg…
Per these exchanges, Stone suggested that he had shared with Trump's legal circle a letter that included a confession that detailed how a sitting Congressman had sex with an underage minor. thedailybeast.com/joel-greenberg…
Also seems pretty clear Greenberg was actively seeking a pardon from Trump as a way of avoiding co-operating with law enforcement. Less a get-out-of-jail-free card; more a skip-the-legal-system-entirely sort of deal.
Authoritarians hate sources of dissent they do not control. Orban in Hungary already neutered universities here. Now he is moving public universities into foundations directly under the control of his allies. nytimes.com/2021/04/27/wor…
As I noted yesterday, this comes after Orban chased away an independent minded university, shut down entire fields of study, took control of research funding and invited universities from another authoritarian regimes who would not challenge his rule
This has all the hallmarks of a corrupt regime: establish resources of public assets for your friends to control, call it efficiency, and make it near-impossible to reverse. It guarantees power even if they lose elections.
I will believe faculty lounge politics is a thing when our faculty gets a lounge. I will believe that faculty lounge politics has the power that James Carville attributes to it when universities spend one-tenth of the money on faculty lounges as they do on football locker rooms.
I am asking everyone replying with "Carville doesn't believe there is an actual faculty lounge, its all just a metaphor" to think this through. He is framing the problem of an intellectual elite cloistered off from the real world who condescend to ordinary people. Thats populism.
My faculty lounge position on this is that people can use any terms they want to describe themselves, and it costs nothing to use terms that other people would prefer, but there is a real danger to blaming every fucking trend you dislike in the world on a cabal of intellectuals.
The reason why none of these “Biden’s plan is to limit you to 4lbs of red meat” posts actually link to Biden’s plan to do this is because no such plan exists.
In other words, they are lying. masslive.com/politics/2021/…
The right wing conspirasphere has just become a means of turning real policy conversations - we need to cut carbon emissions to keep human existence in tolerable conditions - into deranged mischaracterizations - Biden is banning hamburgers!
The fundamental point here is that right wing media, social media clout chasers and politicians see the same incentive structure: the culture war lie is rewarded. Zero pushback or loss of credibility for lying in the conspirasphere in which they operate.
If you are even remotely interested in campus speech and debates about critical race theory, cancel culture etc. this is essential listening.
TLDR: the language may have changed slightly, but we already had this debate in the 1990s podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/you…
Key elements of the 1990s moral panic about political correctness hold today:
*unrepresentative and misleading anecdotes ✅
*conservatives and powerful portraying themselves as victims✅
*donor-funded conservative setting the narrative for mainstream media✅
*Dines D'Souza✅
The biggest difference between the 1990s PC moral panic and today is that the attacks on campus are no longer rhetorical; conservative legislators are more comfortable using state power to act on this nonsense, praising free speech while shutting it down
If it were me, and my political career included a scandal about using a tax-funded private plane for trips as short as 24 miles, I would simply avoid connecting the topics of "politicians", "private planes" and "hypocrisy" urbanmilwaukee.com/2018/08/23/op-…
On the other hand, Walker's post gubernatorial career is full of such conflicts:
He took money to complain that Dems are seeking unfair redistricting packages when he oversaw possibly the worst gerrymander in the United States politico.com/story/2019/03/…