New paper out with some colleagues:

"Natural human cognitive tendencies—like myside bias—make it tempting for people to seek out and agree with low-quality information that affirms their prior beliefs and values while avoiding information that does not. Myside bias fuels the development of ideological silos, epistemic secession, and tribal epistemology. While many view this as largely a right-wing problem, we see this occurring across the political spectrum." 🧵 2/

"The problem runs even deeper than the misuse of information by incompetent, partisan, and/or bad faith actors. People consuming news and information often do not even respond to evidence or arguments. Instead, we rely on our preformed ideas to make sense of what we see. We interpret information to conform to our expectations.

We knew the Critical-Theory left was engaged in a self-defeating enterprise 20 years ago:

"Entire PhD programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. 🧵 2/

"Should I reassure myself by simply saying that bad guys can use any weapon at hand, naturalized facts when it suits them and social construction when it suits them? Should we apologize for having been wrong all along? Or should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit of soul-searching here: what were we really after when we were so intent on showing the social construction of scientific facts?

"The entire historical legacy of Western civilization has been turned into a battlefield. [The book argues] that the stakes in this conflict could not be higher. For when the past is contaminated, it becomes near impossible to endow people's life with meaning in the present.🧵 2/

"There was no formal declaration of war. But, sure enough, at some point at the turn of the century, a war against the past was launched. The partisans supporting the assault on the legacy of European civilization are not members of a party. They have not issued any war aims and have never formulated an explicit strategic vision. They are also a heterogeneous bunch, a coalition of disparate interests and movements.

"The hardest thing in 23 years for me to watch was the city council yesterday making their statement that in essence said every single one of us are racist by the very uniform and badge we wear. And then the news pans out, and it shows the outside of City Hall, where the city council is making their statement. And what do I seen outside? It's a mobile field force around City Hall protecting the very people that called us racist." 🧵 2/

2020's assault on police was, as the quote above shows, pure hypocrisy on the part of elites. But it was also evil and we knew it, bc Roland Fryer proved in 2016 that its premises were false and, in 2020, that it would cause a huge increase in the deaths of black Americans.

"Over the last 10 years, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics."

Academia's attempt to radically reform society has been crushed: 🧵 2/

After trying to remake society in conformity with its (frankly, rather warped and justly unpopular) criteria:

"The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions—as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate—have been rejected.

Many of my Dem/left friends feel rage at Trump voters and masochistic hatred for America, which they see as having succumbed to its own latent transhistorical forces of racism and sexism.

This belief is not only false, as @Musa_alGharbi shows in this 🧵, but it also destroys mental health and, I think, makes it nigh impossible to rebuild the party to regain broad appeal.

Harris didn't lose because of racism or sexism, nor because of wealthy elites, third parties, or turnout.

Check it out: 2/

Did Trump win because of racism? No:

"The GOP has been doing worse with white voters for every single cycle that Trump has been on the ballot, from 2016 through 2024. And there’s tons of evidence that Trump’s racialized language has been a major driver of this trend – it’s been a drag on his support among whites rather than serving as the key to his success.

Meanwhile, Harris did quite well with whites in this cycle. She outperformed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with white voters. The only Democrat who put up comparable numbers with whites over the last couple decades was, incidentally, another black person: Barack Obama in 2008.

Across the board, Harris and Walz improved their numbers with whites – men and women alike. Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle."

Spoke with a male, "mixed" race (black and white) high school student and learned about teen views on race, DEI, and the gender divide over Trump. 🧵

1. Race: He said race at his very diverse HS wasn't an important category. They're all friends and don't divide up by race.

2. DEI: The campus DEI officer, in contrast, and other administrators are obsessed with and very sensitive about race. 2/

2a. DEI, cont'd: He and his peers tease each other amiably about race. This is a bonding mechanism. He said if the DEI officer and other admin found out, they'd be in trouble, so they keep it secret from them.

2b. The DEI officer is seen as "a bit much" and no one likes the class she teaches. All she does is tell them what they can't do or say. She talks incessantly about how to behave in order to be "sensitive." They don't take her at all seriously.

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. 🧵 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.

"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. 🧵 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.'

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. 🧵 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.'

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, ...

"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. 🧵 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.

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. ..."

🧵

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’.

"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 🧵:

https://twitter.com/Tyler_A_Harper/status/1737124773279215917

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. ...

"Thumbing through the literature of contemporary critical social science, one cannot avoid being struck by the astonishing powers that are attributed to 'neoliberalism.' Appalled by the lack of leg-room in economy class airline seats? Apparently neoliberalism is to blame. ... 🧵 2/

"It is difficult to find any feature of modern life that has not been blamed on neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is everywhere, and yet strangely, nowhere. Unlike most intellectual movements, which are openly endorsed, the neoliberal revolution has been perpetrated by stealth.

The dereliction of duty of public K-12 schools counts as systemic racism if anything does.

In contrast, Defense Dept "schools had the highest outcomes in the country for Black and Hispanic students, whose 8th-grade reading scores outpaced nat'l averages for white students." 🧵 2/

Oregon leads the nation in degrading K-12 and abandoning kids:

"By eliminating the standardized test, OR ... has given up on bringing all its students, and particularly those from marginalized communities, up to basic educational standards."

Details:
bit.ly/3QqRJpd

"The antisemitism of my classmates did not develop in a vacuum. It is the result of obfuscations by our professors, many of whom have portrayed Hamas as merely a 'resistance group,' as well as the refusal of our universities to denounce the terror. 🧵 2/

"As a Jew and university student in Washington, D.C., I watched as thousands marched in support of the 'martyred militants' of Hamas, an organization whose charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jewry. Dispersed among the crowds were many of my classmates.

FULL video and transcript of Prof. @RickfordRussell's remarks. Many in my replies are justifying his words as reasonable and empathetic:

"What has Hamas done? Hamas has shifted the balance of power. Hamas has punctured the illusion of invincibility, that's what they've done. 🧵 @RickfordRussell 2/

"You don't have to be a Hamas supporter to recognize that. Hamas has changed the terms of debate. Israeli officials are right. Nothing will be the same again. Nothing will be the same again.

Hamas has challenged the monopoly of violence.

California Community College system "is implementing new DEI rules, mandated by state bureaucrats, that trample on free speech while coercing faculty members on how to teach their subjects, which scholarly conclusions to reach, and even what political positions to advocate." 🧵 @CalCommColleges @conor64 @TheAtlantic 2/

"Some faculty members say they feel like they must choose between their job and their conscience.

All community-college employees will be evaluated in a way that places 'significant emphasis' on 'antiracist' and 'DEIA competencies.' (The A stands for 'accessibility.')

"The Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry argue that universities have a *special fiduciary duty* to foster freedom of thought for the benefit of the societies that sustain them."

New principles that go beyond Chicago Principles of Free Expression (2014). 🧵 2/

"The American university is a historic achievement for many reasons, not least of which is that it provides a haven for free inquiry and the pursuit of truth. Its unique culture has made it a world leader in advancing the frontiers of practical and theoretical knowledge.

"The Western elite culture of transgression is an example of antinomianism. Derived from the Greek words meaning 'against' and 'norm,' the term antinomianism refers to the view that all norms are oppressive, and that the act of transgression in itself is virtuous, if not holy. 🧵 2/

"At the moment, the fashionable justifications invoked by the elite antinomian vandals attacking Western society from within are climate change, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, and 'anti-fascism' as a catchall category.