Thread by @biblioracle

He blocks me on here, so I can't see his tweets, but contextual clues from tweets of others I can see indicate that Conor Friedersdorf is denying any role in stoking the moral panic over cancel culture that has now morphed into authoritarian anti-anti-racism.

In my book, Sustainable. Resilient. Free: The Future of Public Higher Education, I have a chapter discussing how right wing groups like TPUSA/College Fix and centrist types like Jon Haidt (Coddling the American Mind) and Friedersdorf combined to create the current toxic narrative

The right wing critiques of higher ed have been around forever, think WF Buckley and God and Man at Yale, or David Horowitz's book on the most dangerous professors. Nothing new or particularly dangerous.

But around 2015 a series of articles by Friedersdorf, Judith Shulevitz, and others stoked a panic about "snowflake" students. Mix in Coddling the American Mind and the narrative of a defective generation coming to destroy our institutions takes hold.

The centrist cancel culture critique validated and joined the bad faith criticisms of the right. The centrists claimed to be defending the values of the academy, but in reality, they were undermining the institutions, often with distorted attacks.

Friedersdorf's story on Oberlin was a particularly egregious example. Re-reporting at the CHE found that all of the hype was entirely overblown. This is the case with all of these things: chronicle.com/article/colleg…

It's important to understand the role of narrative in these shifts. Thanks to Coddling the American Mind, student protesters were not to be listened to because they were in the grips of a pathology called "safetyism." Protests about racial injustice were therefore illegitimate.

The centrists may not have wished for what DeSantis is doing, or the especially egregious law proposed in Pennsylvania today, but they have absolutely paved the way for these things to happen.

This has always been a struggle for power. Haidt's organization, @HdxAcademy claims to advocate for viewpoint diversity, but that stance is primarily a vehicle to prevent additional diversity around race. They may deny it, but that's the practical upshot.

Let's not forget that @HdxAcademy recently published a piece outright laundering the coordinated harassment of (disproportionately minority) faculty by right wing propagandists. insidehighered.com/blogs/just-vis…

It's all about power. There is a fear of allowing previously marginalized voices access to important places of status. This is what the backlash about Nikole Hannah-Jones being offered a position at UNC is about. They cannot let someone like her become more prominent.

People like Friederdorf will fall back on technicalities, endlessly parsing their own work, but you have to be willfully dense to not see what kind of effect his work on this has in aggregate. The Chris Rufos of the world thank goodness for CF and his ilk daily.

I'm bad at this. Here's a link to Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education, my attempt to cut through the B.S. of big brain discourse and get to the crux of what our post-secondary institutions can and should be doing. beltpublishing.com/collections/pr…

TBH, Friedersdorf was terrible on this subject for the period when the narrative was shifting, but Coddling the American Mind did far more damage to spread B.S. in to the world that validated right wing critiques while also stoking center left concerns.

Like I assume FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) will be issuing concerned statements about things like this Pennsylvania law, but it's their guy who literally started all this stuff. FIRE dude is the arsonist.

This sums it up pretty good.

https://twitter.com/ChesterScoville/status/1408536375025098757

This is what the protests at places like Yale and elsewhere back in the early days of stoking the moral panic was about. Students knew stuff was messed up. Figures in power have been trying to shut them up.

https://twitter.com/nhannahjones/status/1408532647257817096

People in positions of influence look at Nikole Hannah-Jones and are terrified of what it will mean to them if she is given access to positions of power and influence that they hold because they know that they will be obviated. It's all fear of being exposed as irrelevant.

For the right wingers, the fear is explicitly tied into their white supremacy. For the centrists, it's more subconscious, a belief that they are the arbiters of what's right and wrong that's rooted in the same places as the right wingers, but is more sublimated.

Ask why Bret Stephens has felt it necessary to try to discredit the 1619 Project. Is it because of a sincere difference in views, or because he's deeply afraid of a culture where the voices of black folks are as valued as voices like his?

Great example of the dynamic. Co-founder of @HdxAcademy retweets post about article laundering the clearly bad faith intent of new Florida law. Anyone in higher ed should be decrying this law, but not these folks because DeSantis will keep them in charge.

https://twitter.com/HdxAcademy/status/1408107660671660033

Jon Haidt makes thousands of dollars per speech to peddle his nonsense about safetyism and the need for viewpoint diversity. It is a great freaking gig, and he isn't going to let anything like authoritarian moves by legislatures screw it up.