2/ To understand what's happening today we need to understand how the 2007 housing crisis happened.
Once we do that I'll show you how what's going on in America's elite institutions today perfectly mirrors what happened in the housing market during 2007
Let's begin
3/ To begin, we need to know what a Mortgage-Backed Security (MBS) is.
The bank take mortgages from different markets, packages them together, and then sell them. The buyer makes money collecting the mortgage payments the bank makes a profit selling mortgages.
That's the idea
4/ The idea here is to spread out the risk of lending.
If you lend a billion dollars to one person and they don't pay you back, you lose a billion dollars. If you lend a mortage to 10,000 people and one doesn't pay you back, you still make money on the rest of the mortgages.
5/ In this way you end up with lots of mortgages that almost everyone is paying on, and as long as that happens the package is very valuable, and whoever buys the loans gets to make money collecting the mortgage payments.
But there's a catch...people have to make their payments
6/ If loans are made by reputable lenders with high standards to people with good credit who can afford them, almost all the mortgages get paid off.
If the banks lower their standards, make bad loans, engage in fraud, then mortgages don't get paid...and the bank loses it's money
7/
In 2007 banks began to lower their standards, make risky loans, give high risk mortgages to people who could not afford them.
OK, now here is the key thing that explains what's going on in out institutions. Pay close attention.....
8/ Then banks took all those bad, risky, fraudulent, low standard mortgages and packaged them together into Mortgage backed securities....and then sold them like they were just as good as the good, safe, legitimate, high standard mortgages.
See what the problem is here???
9/ They packaged thousands of corrupt loans that were never going to be paid off into Mortgage backed securities, and sold them like they just as good as the Mortgage backed securities that were filled with good loans.
And then people bought these MBS's full of terrible loans...
10/ Not only that, but using various other financial instruments, the Mortgage-Backed securities get bought, sold, traded, and loaned and end up getting used in deals made by banks, insurance agencies, pensions funds, unions, commercial businesses, corporations and so fourth...
11/ When lots of bad mortgages are packeded and sold as though they were just as legitimate as good mortgages, you get an entire economy that's built on a foundation of bad mortgages, low standards, fraud, and corruption
This is basically what's happened with our institutions
12/ An economy built on bad mortgages people can't afford collapses when the payments stop because organizations that depend on those payments end up going broke, and other organizations that financially depend the first set of organizations also go broke. They fall like dominos
13/ This is what's happening in our elite institutions.
I will explain.
Our society is held together by a number of interconnected social, economic, education, and governmental institutions. The capital those institutions function on is trust, competence, and knowledge.
14/ The way institutions maintain trus is by ensuring the people they employ are competent, and the knowledge/information that is used by those institution meets the highest standards and criteria for accuracy and truth.
When that those standards are met, everything is fine.
15/ However, just like how the housing market in 2007 relied on fraudulent mortgages, our elite institutions rely on incompetent people and bad information created using corrupt, biased, and politically motivated, theories and ideas.
*THAT* is the story people are missing.
16/ Over the Last Several years, a number of things have happened which demonstrate that the knowledge, information, theories, and ideas coming out of elite institutions are created by politically motivated activists who are using fraudulent theories with low standards.
17/ A terrific example of this is the grievance studies affair, in which @ConceptualJames, @peterboghossian and @HPluckrose went undercover and wrote a several intentional and obviously absurd papers, and got them accepted in prestigious academic journals.
@ConceptualJames @peterboghossian @HPluckrose 18/
Another example is comes from @realchrisrufo and @aaronsibarium who have shown that a number of high profile people in elite institutions, including the Vice-President of the U.S. and the Former President of Harvard created their work using plagiarism.
@ConceptualJames @peterboghossian @HPluckrose @realchrisrufo @aaronsibarium 19/
The result is that the academic journals, academic studies, institutions of elite education have taken a bunch of flawed, biased, corrupt, and politically motivated theories, packaged them together, and then sold them to institutions filled with incompetent people.
@ConceptualJames @peterboghossian @HPluckrose @realchrisrufo @aaronsibarium 20/
In the same way banks lowered their standards and filled Mortgage-backed securities with fraudulent loans, our elite institutions lowered their standards, and have filled their academic journals and prestige publications with woke nonsense written by incompetent activists.
@ConceptualJames @peterboghossian @HPluckrose @realchrisrufo @aaronsibarium 21/
The result is that all of our important social institutions (schools, hospitals, governments, etc) that rely on elite institutions to get them good information are being handed politically motivated garbage written by woke activists and told that it is real knowledge.
22/ Political activists in fields like Critical Race Theory, post-colonial theory, and Gender Studies created fraudulent academic journals with poor standards as a vehicle to publish biased papers and studies. Then they claim all of that is legitimate knowledge and scholarship.
23/ Now huge numbers of institutions rely on journals, studies, and so fourth that are filled with nonsense.
When people realize this, the credibility, reputation, prestige, and funding of elite institutions which spread that nonsense is going to evaporate.
When that happens...
24/ it will create a domino effect causing other institutions that depend on the elite institutions to face a crisis as well.
If the crisis is deep enough, and enough incompetent, biased, politically corrupt activity is exposed, a domino effect across institutions will occur.
25/ The result will be a collapse of the highest and most prestigious elite institutions in the same way we saw the collapse of giant, rich, prestigious, financial institutions (like Bear Sterns) during the 2008 financial crisis.
The start of that is what we are seeing right now
26/ This is the story that everyone is missing. What @realchrisrufo is doing is not just pointing out a few plagiarists; he is showing the rot and corruption of our elite institutions, and pointing out that the legitimacy of many of these institutions is a mirage.
/fin
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1. There is no such legal category as "hate speech" 2. You don't defeat ideas by banning them 3. Adopting a leftist frame ("hate speech" is leftist framing) is always a losing proposition.
The entire literature on hate speech was created by leftists, and is embedded with leftist assumptions. There is no way to appropriate that body of work without rehabilitating and legitimizing leftist arguments against free speech and in favor of censorship.
The reason the trans-movement is so nihilistic, violent, and unhinged is because it is postmodern, and the postmodern intellectual solvent it uses to dissolve the distinction between male and female also dissolves the distinction between good and evil.
The postmodern ideology of the transgender activists believes all values of any kind (moral, social, scientific, and epistemic) are just social constructs that have been constructed in alignment with the interests of the dominant ideology or ruling class.
so...
On this view the legitimacy of a given set of values is not a matter of fact, it depends on the interests of the people evaluating those values. As such the values of a society are a determined by which group has the power to embed it's interests in the social value structure...
People who celebrate the murder of their political opponents are not participating in the marketplace of ideas, they are encouraging deadly political violence by building a permission structure to legitimize and justify the murder of those they disagree with.
My freedom of speech means I get to clearly and succintly explain to the whole world that if you call for the assassination of your rivals this is not free speech, it is a direct incitement to political violence.
John Stewart Mill gave a famous example where he said that if someone claims corn dealers are starvering the poor this can be allowed if circulated through the press, but is not allowed when shouted in front of an excited mob assembled outside the house of a corn dealer....
1/ The Radical Left has used political violence to advance their cause for decades. What's new is the progressive left's professional class building a permission structure to justify the use of political violence
It's called Assassination Culture, and we need to talk about it
🧵
2/ To understand what's happening, you need to understand that the line between progressive-left professional class and radical left has been blurred. The extremist radical left and the socially progressive "bluesky left" are increasingly intertwined both socially and politically
3/ This is because many of the extremist radical from the 60's and 70' who advocated for, and participated in, the use of political violence have been welcomed into the mainstream institutions that are run by the progressive left professional class.
Look at the number of pro-athletes posting condolences about Charlie Kirk, and you'll see what a huge cultural figure he was.
He wasn't just famous in conservative circles, his clips debating college students were a loadbearing pillar of online political pop-culture
His willingness to calmly and politely debate all comers on any issue (at the very moment when cancel culture was strongest and people were afraid to say what they think) made him a sort of lovable internet folkhero.
He was an indelible piece of the online landscape.
Charlie was not quarantined to the "conservative ghetto" of online content; he broke contain and became a mainstream cultural figure.
Charlie became the cultural symbol of free debate, free speech, and settling differences in public with words
What he is describing here is the deconstruction of America as an ideal. The goal is to destroy America by subverting the conception of America as a force for good which sustains American confidence, and attacking the founding narrative from which America derives it's legitimacy.
They will try to redefine America in a way which subverts the legitimacy of America as a national project. They want to erase the current American narrative, and replace it with a new one which grants them the right to inherit America's wealth, power, prestige, and influence.
They will attack America the same way they attacked Universities: by undermining legitimacy, authority, and self-confidence by asserting that the whole project is just racism, colonialism, and oppression in disguise.