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Julian Sanchez Profile picture
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1 Jul, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Cosign: Excellent piece. The key point is that the disturbing rise of bonkers conspiracy movements has to be understood more as a failure of trust than of rationality.
We might say “I’m a rational person; I form views based on science…” But usually you didn’t DO the science. You trust the social credentialing systems that validate the people who assure us they did the science.
Yeah, one reason this flourishes is that given the sheer quantity of news and scientific pronouncements, it’s trivial to come up with lots of examples of Approved Sources getting things wrong (or even just seemingly wrong).
The “availability heuristic” is a legacy of brains designed for much smaller societies: “If I can think of a couple examples of something, it’s probably fairly common.” So people end up disproportionately afraid of rare but sensational events like “kidnappings by strangers."
Someone disposed to think the New York Times is a lying rag can cite plenty of things they got wrong (and then be convinced things they got right also belong on the list).

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More from @normative

Julian Sanchez Profile picture
1 Jul
It’s been clear for a long while that a big part of why our conversations around race are so broken is that folks on left & right have very different ideas of what “racism” means. yahoo.com/news/poll-the-…
We still see versions of this exchange constantly:

“Racism is embedded in American culture and institutions.”

“Why are you calling me, personally, a racist?"
Mostly the problem here is that many on the right stridently refuse to think in any terms other than individual hatred. Though I also wish folks on the left would stop insisting on pushing claims that defy ordinary usage in ways that end up sounding ridiculous.
Read 4 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
25 Jun
I find myself increasingly frustrated with all sides of this conversation. The right wing media has made a crude caricature of a varied body of academic work their flavor-of-the-week boogieman, while the pushback is veering toward “CRT? Never heard of it. Does it even exist?"
Simultaneously true:
(A) The CRT backlash is badly confused about what CRT is, and often in bad faith.
(B) There really does exist a line of CRT, influential in some ed departments & teacher trainings, that views pedagogy as a locus of activism for racial equity.
That second part, however distorted the noise machine’s picture of it, is not a conspiracy theory or made up. There are books and conferences and everything. Pre-backlash nobody would have seriously denied this part.
Read 12 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
14 Jun
I think CRT is a mixed bag, some of which is insightful, some of which is off base; it doesn’t seem particularly illuminating to reduce the whole bundle to “the crudest elements of Ibram Kendi’s worldview.” And I think Cooke is pulling the same bait & switch he diagnoses.
To wit: Nobody’s banning teaching about racism! The sudden popular relevance of a recherché academic theory is purely about sparing little Jaden a daily Maoist struggle session! But then you look at the Florida statute, and gosh it seems broader than that.
Instruction, Florida stipulates, may not include "the theory that racism is not merely the product of prejudice, but that racism is embedded in American society and its legal systems in order to uphold the supremacy of white persons.”
Read 12 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
13 Jun
Ok, but the trouble is (as the campaigns against it acknowledge) no pre-collegiate schools are explicitly teaching “Critical Race Theory.” So you get a hunt for supposedly suspicious phrases like “systemic racism” or “white supremacy.”
One guide for parents, which warns that “they are trying to culturally replace you,” suggests watching out for any of these pernicious CRT buzzwords, many of which would be involved in any serious discussion of race in American history. americarenewing.com/issues/list-cr…
The pop definitions of CRT I see lately tend to involve a list of supposed “tenets” that invariably include obviously pernicious claims almost nobody would endorse and what ought at this point to be rather banal truisms.
Read 6 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
11 Jun
Trump could probably put a stop to this. If he wanted to.
We need to be blunt about where we are. The de facto head of one of our two major political parties is leveraging threats of terrorist violence as part of a campaign to corrupt the administration of the electoral process.
He’s able to do this in a way that makes him impossible to hold responsible for it under U.S. law, but it’s nevertheless what he’s doing. And it could absolutely work.
Read 7 tweets
Julian Sanchez Profile picture
10 Jun
Just skip to page 9 where they give away the game: “[T]hey are trying to socially replace you.”
This document makes fairly explicit the strategy I posited in a thread yesteday.

Step 1: Take the sprawling body of academic work that can be labeled “Critical Race Theory,” give it a cartoonishly evil definition, and set it up as the new bogeyman coming for your children.
Step 2: But the CRT overlords are tricksy, and won’t CALL their indoctrination schemes “CRT”. So you have to look out for “buzzwords.” Like “structural bias.” Or “white supremacy.” Or “institutional bias.” Or “normativity.” Or… “equity.”

americarenewing.com/issues/list-cr…
Read 8 tweets

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