A university is defined by what it deems most important, & this can be seen in what it is researching & teaching. It can evolve drastically over time as when modern secular colleges emerged from religious institutions. I posit something new has emerged in recent history. THREAD. 2. In 2016, a brilliant social psychologist by the name of @JonHaidt described what he saw as a schism forming within the university system. He claimed that US colleges were caught between two irreconcilable missions, truth & change, & referenced quotes to exemplify each outlook.

New Left identitarians, like Claudine Gay, discovered they could mimic forms of expertise as a means to power for their DEI activism. Her academic work is representative of a vast body of laundered research & credentials that prop up the entire DEI edifice. 1/n In an audacious hoax project, @peterboghossian, @HPluckrose, & @ConceptualJames submitted ludicrous research papers to highly esteemed journals in DEI-related fields to expose the activist racket. 7 absurd papers were published, most in top-tier journals. 2/n

This documentary is a case study of the ideology & ethos embedded in DEI bureaucracies. It covers the relationship between identity studies, student activists, and the DEI administration of a college in Olympia, Washington. Part 1/3. Part 2: Teaching to Transgress.

Recent congressional hearings in the US have created a broader willingness to look at higher eds ideology problem. University leadership has reached an inflection point that I’ll try to explain here in simple terms. THREAD I’ll start by drawing a comparison between a scientific theory & a Critical Theory (CT), which is the theoretical work that underlies DEI administrations, most student activism, & the disingenuous testimony we heard at the hearings. 2/n

A renowned public intellectual, @Ayaan Hirsi Ali, tapped the zeitgeist with a recent article published to @unherd entitled “Why I am Now a Christian.” The piece is a literal come-to-Jesus moment for Ayaan, who is famous for her atheism advocacy. THREAD Her decision to adopt Christianity was more than personal, Ayaan worries that the faithless “dislocated masses” of the West will not fare well in a civilisational war against The CCP, Islamism, Putin’s Russia, & the religiously Woke. 2/n

What explains this amorphous leftish coalition? It's not random - a particular ideological understanding of the world unites these issues. THREAD These seemingly different interest groups are held together by Woke Identitarian ideology, which has a grand unifying theory of oppression called "Intersectionality". Here's an explainer montage I cobbled together from different NGO resources. 2/n

In 1922, a journalist by the name of Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion where he explored the limitations of the liberal democratic order in the burgeoning era of mass media. 1/n This was a time between the world wars when innovations in radio, the telegraph, industrial printing, & cinema were being honed as powerful tools for propagandising the masses. 2/n

"What this issue has revealed is a crisis in the published medical research"

Jillian Spencer, a brave child psychiatrist, has connected the dots between problems within gender clinics & a system-level failure that begins with the academic publishing process. 1/4 Activist researchers are essentially laundering political opinions as established facts through the peer review process. The problem is a new form of epistemological (how we know what we know) activism that contorts knowledge resources from the source - academic journals. 2/4

These campaigns are essenatilly recruitment strategies for social surveillance that reveal a technocratic impulse to control previously unsupervised areas of our social lives. 1/4 https://t.co/flaL0FDkivtwitter.com/i/web/status/1…

https://twitter.com/MayorofLondon/status/1683769706472144898

They proceed from a new form of social 'expertise' that reframes our natural instincts as culturally conditioned biases that ought to be suppressed. If you track the assumptions to thier source you find a bizarre & cynical perspective on human beings. 2/4

Several people have contacted me about the evocative phrase“the seed of a genocide” that @ConceptualJames mentions in his recently released discussion with @jordanbpeterson. The full discussion is available here - . 1/6 https://t.co/F03ISJv2vk https://t.co/0tYXpiNUk1
twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
The idea for the Progressive Stack paper came up while James & I were joking about how identity scholars might go about indulging in vengeful cruelty while maintaining a dignified scholarly front. We landed on the idea of "experiential reparations". 2/6

Here's an example of what I call "hermeneutical tribes". A news event takes place & information workers sort through a massive constellation of cold, dead data points. They select, omit, & arrange these facts relative to an interpretive schema - a hermeneutic. 1/6

The arrangements become warm, coherent, & fit for human consumption. Hermeneutical tribes are large networks of people & organisations that reify a shared moral worldview by consistently creating & signal-boosting particular arrangements of facts. 2/6

The carnivorous glowworms of New Zealand. These beautiful worms hang silk threads covered in sticky mucus from the surface of caves. Their haunting soft light lures prey that gets tangled in their threads. 1/n The irresistible Sirens of Greek mythology were sea nymphs, part woman, and part bird, who lived on an island in the Mediterranean Sea. They'd lure passing sailors with irresistible songs and get a perverse pleasure from watching the men perish on thier rocky shores. 2/n

I've been calling this "oughtism". As soon as I realise I'm talking to an oughtistic person I have to change the mode of conversation to accommodate their affliction.

https://twitter.com/KonstantinKisin/status/1497377508408410114

As @KonstantinKisin suggests this phenomenon is more prevalent on the left. I genuinely think this is a knock-on effect of the Critical Theory mindset that has come to dominate left-wing political culture. 2/n

When you overestimate that which is under your control, you have to find a home for the burden of guilt tied to the ills you believe to be curable. This is why utopians inevitably hunt down scapegoats. They're desperate for cathartic absolution.

https://twitter.com/MikeNayna/status/1431868368496119812?s=20

It's difficult to come to terms with how deep woke logic penetrates & how far it's spread. It's not just normative values that are conflated with prejudice but all norms. THREAD

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1476610636897472517

The crudest way to understand woke doctrine is that the experience of oppression is felt sacred. Everything else is complicated theoretical gymnastics to avoid encroaching on victim experience or positing that marginal identity groups take responsibility for unequal outcomes. 2/5

Peter Boghossian resigns from Portland State University after an ongoing battle to uphold intellectual diversity at the institution. 1/4

https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1435576254074220552

2/4

A utopian movement will always seek to control the art & history of a people. When a population is flooded with stories that serve a particular social theory perspectives calcify & people start to make sense of themselves & their experiences through the ideological framework. 1/3

https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1431820688394838017

Often recruited as cannon fodder by chickenhawk intellectuals, young people are the most susceptible to losing themselves in a movement. Their identities are malleable & simplistic ideological explanations have little real-world experience to conflict with. 2/3

An exciting conclusion to the @LetterWiki story. A story that somehow began for me with a very strange stage show about Nelson Mandela. THREAD

https://twitter.com/maxwillens/status/1420732154959605763

Letter co-founders, @DayneRathbone, @ClydeRathbone, & I first collaborated on a comedy series about a South African idiot savant (Dayne) who produces a musical play about Nelson Mandela. 2/12

I was taken aback when I first stumbled into the back-end money networks propping up the culture war. The reality is though, that both camps have huge constellations of 501c3/501c4 (not-for-profit) organizations channeling money into shaping discourse. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… 1/4

https://twitter.com/AmandaMarcotte/status/1414903865997201408

There's a kind of ideological feudalism afoot where the extremely wealthy fund intellectual battles & "knowledge" production to shape the culture toward a personal vision. The ones I've met are well-intended but, as you can imagine, change of any kind is a messy business. 2/4

The people going after "CRT in schools" have a far deeper critique than they're currently able to articulate & their opposition is yet to fathom. They're against the entire Critical Pedagogy enterprise, which is a fundamentally illiberal form of education. THREAD. The "CRT in schools" issue is currently bogged down in a semantic quagmire because the movement has few analytical resources to draw from. Analysis of the problem within higher ed is typically dismissed as a "right-wing talking point" (feat @SRCHicks). 2/5.

Liberal institutions across WEIRD society are going through an ideological coup set in motion by philosopher activists. Observing these organisations succumb to teleological capture I’m reminded of the Cuckoo. Thread. A Cuckoo lays its egg in the nest of another species. In this analogy, a postmodern activist is employed by a liberal organisation. Like a Cuckoo egg, the postmodern worldview looks enough like the liberal one for it to go unnoticed. 2/6