Jake 🇺🇸 Profile picture
Nov 9 10 tweets 5 min read Read on X
I am 53 years old. The last 4 years amount to the most repressive, totalitarian era I've ever lived through.

"If the general atmosphere of fear we live in as people who want to speak and live freely—if all that change in American society had the fingerprints of a particular leader on it, that leader would be a fascist."
—@noam_dworman

But it was not a particular leader—it was the left. 🧵Image
2/

It was not a fascist leader but a society-wide culture of totalitarian intolerance that made me watch my words like a hawk for half a decade.

It was fear of retaliation from the left that made me lay awake at night, terrified that a student might have misinterpreted something I said in class and initiated a cancellation campaign against me.
3/

It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of retribution—in the face of which tenured faculty and college administrators cowered—wielded by 18-year-olds that ended the career of a colleague of mine because she read out loud a word in an antiracist comic book. Yes, students, with the complicity of an entire college staffed with cowards whose fear was nonetheless rational, actually ended her career for reading an ANTIRACIST comic book.
4/

It was not a fascist leader but a leftwing culture of fear that generated countless whispers among faculty in the halls of my college and others, every professor afraid to tell any but their most trusted colleagues, about how students had stood up in class to accuse them of "traumatizing" or "harming" them for teaching basic facts, or of failing to teach the subject from the now-mandatory ideological perspective of Afropessimism, or of teaching material, unobjectionable just the year before, that was inherently "white supremacist."Image
5/

I personally know artists whose careers and businesses the mob attempted to destroy because they did not post a black square on Facebook in 2020.

I personally know musicians who lost their bands and music career merely for revealing that they were reading a book that had been effectively "banned" by the left.Image
6/

I know of accomplished leaders in the world of arts and culture who lost their careers because the statement of solidarity with BLM that they wrote was not vociferous enough.

I know of physicians who lost important positions, were subjected to star chamber proceedings, and whose words were scrubbed from the internet merely for suggesting that socioeconomic conditions and not the phony construct of "implicit bias" were responsible for racial health disparities.
7/

I know of a liberal, gay Canadian educator, who had served children selflessly for decades, who was driven to suicide after being derided as a racist in front of an audience of all his peers by a DEI trainer in a COVID-era Zoom call. Image
8/

None of this repressiveness, this intolerance, this insistence that only a single view was acceptable on pain of cancelation—along with the fear that it all generated—was imposed by a fascist leader. It was imposed through the distributed channels of individual agents converging on an ideology and a set of practices to enforce it. It was imposed by all the individuals and institutions whose rationally self-interested fear made them who turned their eyes away, allowing it to happen and tacitly endorsing it. And I cannot but include myself in this indictment—all of us like Peter thrice denying the Jesus of our colleagues, friends, and family in order to save our own skins from the mob by falsifying ~every last one of our preferences.
9/

There was an entire class of people who genuinely never felt a moment of fear of their neighbors, students, colleagues, or acquaintances, who sincerely never did notice episodes of retribution and cancelation such as I've described here. My theory is that these people's own ideology so mirrored that of the dominant social configuration that they simply never experienced a moment of friction. And it's not, for the most part, that they had previously arrived at "woke" ideology independently, and then merely recognized fellow travelers in other wokists. Rather, their minds were such as to instantly and uncritically conform themselves to whatever it was we were supposed to believe or endorse this week—from abolishing slave-patrol policing in America, to mass graves of Indians in Canada, to human biology having no bearing on a person's sex or gender. They were, and remain, in the grip of a mass delusion.
10/

This is by and large the same class of people you will see commenting here and telling me that none of this ever happened or that I have fallen for a right-wing lie. Some of these people will make a faulty inference from this 🧵 and assume that I am a hardcore right-winger. In a classic case of the whataboutism fallacy, they'll say, well, what about the Republicans?, and they'll accuse me of carrying water for a right wing that is supposedly far more repressive than any leftist or Democrat could ever aspire to be.

Even dumber, they'll say that my supposed experience of intolerance is exactly what a bigot should expect. If I have views that were impossible to express on campus over the past years, that is just and good, for it entails that my views must have been beyond the pale, and no campus is obliged to platform or tolerate Nazis and their ilk.

These inferences and accusations are all false. I can be angry about left-wing repressiveness and still be plenty alarmed by right-wing repressiveness, and indeed I am. I have spoken out on this platform against Florida's Stop WOKE Act, for example, and against the crushing of pro-Palestinian speech on some campuses, and just this morning I shared my well-grounded fear that Trump will end up invoking the Insurrection Act.

But there is simply no equivalency between the impact on my "lived experience" of the daily, grinding paranoia and fear that the leftist culture of repression has created in me and that I have seen it create in countless students and colleagues, and my more abstract and theoretical concerns about a repressive right, that is in any event far more local (FL, TX, etc.), not nearly as global, as the society-wide leftist culture that I describe here. I will not be gaslit!

x.com/omni_american/…

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More from @omni_american

Oct 26
"West Coast [progressivism] is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent. On the one hand, it’s the same schoolmarmish, nanny-state liberalism you can find in any blue state: bans on plastic straws, quotas for women on corporate boards, mandated gender neutral toy aisles. On the other, it’s the exact inverse: permissiveness verging on criminal negligence. 🧵Image
2/

"In SF, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as 'progressive.'Image
3/

"In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?Image
Read 12 tweets
Aug 14
Colleges "decolonize" curricula even as they ax foreign languages. Why? I think (1) colleges want to appear to value "diversity" without scaring off students by requiring hard work; and profs urge decolonization/diversity only to advance (2a) their own parochial interests, or (2b) nakedly political agendas (see 2a). No one actually cares about "decolonization" or "diversity." If they did, they'd be advocating for much more rather than less language study. 🧵Image
2/

"Serious efforts to decolonize the American college curriculum cannot take place amid waning support for the study of world languages. Yet that is precisely what we are witnessing today: American colleges and universities eliminate language programs while continuing to trumpet their commitment to curricular diversity and 'inclusive excellence.'Image
3/

"It seems a stereotypically American, and perhaps more broadly imperialist, conceit to believe that we can create cosmopolitan monoglots. When we undervalue the study of world languages, we shut the door to true cosmopolitanism and all the awe and wonder it inculcates. We deny students the opportunity to participate in and engage deeply with other cultures, to fathom how our language shapes our view of the world, and to do the hard work that fosters meaningful cross-cultural interactions and mutual respect.Image
Read 4 tweets
Jun 15
My college's Board of Trustees rejected a request by SJP/JVP to divest from Boeing, Elbit Systems, Caterpillar, and Lockheed Martin.

Student paper reached out for comment. Here's what I said.

"I endorse the decision of the Board of Trustees regarding the divestment proposal.🧵
2/

"The Board gave several reasons for their decision, the most important of which is, in my view, the consideration that 'taking a position on a complex geopolitical situation would potentially chill the expression of diverse opinions, undermine the expression of pluralism, ...
3/

"...and alienate members of our community.' The Board’s decision is very much in line with the stance of 'institutional neutrality' recommended in the well-known 1967 Kalven Committee 'Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.'

provost.uchicago.edu/sites/default/…
Read 12 tweets
Jun 1
"In itself the outcome would seem to vindicate a fundamental American principle, that no citizen is beyond the reach of justice. Yet over the long run this prosecution will probably do more to weaken than affirm the rule of law. 🧵 Image
2/

"Legal experts have cited numerous avenues for credible appeal, and any appeal will not be resolved until long after the November election. That will make it all the easier for Mr Trump’s supporters to embrace his arguments that he is the victim of a biased judge and jury. Image
3/

"This verdict is particularly vulnerable to appeal because of the lack of clear precedent for the charges the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, chose to bring. Image
Read 15 tweets
May 15
DEVASTATING review of 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘈𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘴:

"The authors of the volume...appear not to be ‘scholars,’ but rather ideologues and political activists, interested in changing political reality rather than in studying the ancient world. ..."

🧵
Image
Image
2/

"Several months ago, when I was walking along Hills Road in Cambridge on a Sunday afternoon, I saw something unheard-of in Poland. Two students were standing on the pavement, holding up a poster of Lenin and distributing leaflets encouraging people to ‘join the Communists’. Image
3/

"For a while I wondered whether I should ask these nice-looking young people whether they knew what the Kronstad Rebellion or Cheka were. After all, they were most likely students of one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Image
Read 41 tweets
Dec 19, 2023
"wokeness is not the cause of the collapse of the humanities. It’s a symptom of it"

There's a lot that I agree with in this 🧵:
2/

Were I most deeply disagree with @Tyler_A_Harper is that I think wokeness in the Humanities is largely endogenous. It arose organically out of the pursuit of "the next new theory." The professional life and death of Humanists depends on their ability to find a new theory. ...
@Tyler_A_Harper 3/

I've watched this dynamic for over 40 years now. My dad was an academic. He embraced Deconstruction in the '70s. No admin made him do it. He found the theory truly compelling but also the theory set him apart, made him avant-garde, helped him in his competition w/ his peers.
Read 25 tweets

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