I have a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies, but I’m not woke anymore. I write under a pseudonym because, if my colleagues were to find out about my criticisms of this field, I would be unable to find any employment in academia. That someone who critiques the axioms of a field of study feels compelled to write under an assumed name tells you everything you need to know about the authoritarianism underpinning this ideology. I no longer believe that the fundamental ideas of Women’s Studies, and of Critical Social Justice more generally, describe reality; they are at best partial explanations—hyperbolic ideology, not fact-based analysis. I have seen this ideology up close and seen how it consumes and even destroys people, while dehumanizing anyone who dissents.
I’m sad to say it, but I believe that Critical Social Justice ideology—if not beaten in the war of ideas—will destroy the liberal foundation of American society. By liberal I mean principles including, but not limited to, constitutional republican government, equality under the law, due process, a commitment to reason and science, individual liberty, and freedom—of speech, of the press, and of religion. Because Critical Social Justice ideology is now the dominant paradigm in American academia, it has flowed into all other major societal institutions, the media, and even corporations. Far from being counter-cultural, Critical Social Justice ideology is now the cultural mainstream. A diverse spectrum of liberals, libertarians, conservatives, and all others who, to put it bluntly, want the American constitution to continue to serve as the basis for our society have to team up to prevent this ideology from destroying our country.
I became “woke” around 2003, so I have nearly two decades of experience with Critical Social Justice ideology. As the oldest daughter in a working-class family with six kids, neither of my parents had a college degree, although my mom had taken some community college classes. My high school teachers emphasized the importance of going to college. While I wasn’t sure what opportunities a college education would bring, I decided that it would best to attend, given the urgency with which all the teachers and guidance counselors discussed college as a necessity. I was a good, not great, student, who scored highly very highly on the verbal component of standardized tests. I loved literature and writing, so I figured that I’d get a bachelor’s degree in English literature, then maybe find a job as an administrative assistant and write in my free time. For a seventeen year-old girl who wasn’t especially ambitious, it seemed like a decent plan. At least it was better, I thought, than continuing to work part-time as a waitress. And through a combination of scholarships and part-time work, I realized that I’d be able to complete a bachelor’s degree without incurring any debt.
When I began attending college classes in 2000, I registered for a Western civilization course and fell in love with the Greek and Roman classics, so I continued to take additional courses of this type. The twentieth-century Western civilization course was taught by a very personable and funny women’s studies professor. I don’t think it is widely understood that first-generation college students, in general, don’t know the politics behind who becomes university professors. I naively assumed that professors are among the smartest people in the country, and I had no idea that the professoriate is heavily slanted to the ideological left. I now understand that Critical Social Justice professors are evangelists for their faith and the university is their mission field. Their goal is to take young students—inexperienced, eager to succeed—unmoor them from any faith tradition they might have, even if it’s just American civics, and replace that with Critical Social Justice ideology. And, for the most part, these professors succeed. They are, on the whole, likable people—energetic, personable, and caring.
My first encounters with Critical Social Justice came during the feminism unit of this course, which included works by Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Shulamith Firestone, among others. I was interested in learning about feminism, but Firestone’s argument to eliminate the biological family alarmed me, as I hoped to have both a career and children someday. Also, I didn’t believe Firestone’s argument that motherhood is inherently oppressive. From witnessing my mom’s own experiences with having six kids, I knew that she wasn’t oppressed. It was a choice she freely made because she loved children and felt that taking care of them, in spite of the difficulties, was rewarding. In spite of my reservations about Firestone’s book, I became interested in learning more about feminism and began to check out more women’s studies books from the library. As a young university student, encountering Critical Social Justice ideas felt intoxicating, like stumbling onto a portal into a new world. I felt like a detective, with my newly developing critical consciousness understanding society for the first time—all the oppression, the sexism, racism, the evils of capitalism, and so on. It felt righteous, like I was part of a counter-cultural movement, a vanguard helping to bend the arc of the moral universe toward justice.
The women’s studies professor, sensing that she had an acolyte, encouraged my interest in becoming more involved in advocacy for women. Over the summer, I worked as an intern at a feminist nonprofit and met a lot of people on the radical left, including anarchists. Around this time, I attended a few protests for various causes, but after a couple of years with this ideology as my guiding framework, I grew exhausted by feeling constant anger. I became tired of focusing on all the injustices of the world, not on what I had to be grateful for. It was a miserable, resentment-based life, and I felt helpless to solve the world’s problems.
My foray into radical politics ended around the time I started a master’s program in creative writing. I focused on reading literature and my colleagues’ works, which were complex and nuanced, not ideologically motivated in the slightest degree. After finishing my master’s degree, I taught writing as a college lecturer for a couple of years, then decided to apply for Ph.D. programs in hopes that having a doctorate would increase my pay. One of the most galling forms of hypocrisy I’ve experienced is that leftist professors claim a commitment to “social justice,” yet the academic departments they run employ large numbers of underpaid adjunct instructors who are closed out of the high pay and job security of the tenured radicals.
When I began my Ph.D. program in 2013 at a highly ranked university, I began to see that something about my new colleagues was different from what I remembered about my colleagues just a few years earlier. At first, I chalked this up to the fact that I was a handful of years older than most of the students, many of whom had recently completed their undergraduate degrees. They seemed angry, self-righteous, and determined, lacking the intellectual humility that I had admired so much in the friends I’d made in my master’s program. I now realize that these students were “woke.” Having spent the past couple of years teaching writing to working-class students, I hadn’t been exposed to Critical Social Justice ideology in some time, and I was surprised to see the inroads it had made in the decade since I’d first encountered it.
I realized that Critical Social Justice was no longer a fringe intellectual field of study, but a real force that was reshaping the university. Early on in my program, I recall a panic about racism at the university, and many students issued social media demands of the administration to increase minority enrollment. While I fully support that goal, I feel that such efforts are best advanced through mentoring and guiding promising young students beginning in elementary school, not waiting until they reach adulthood and then attempting to force equal outcomes. Around this time, I became extremely disturbed when, while serving on a committee that gave writing awards, I was attacked by other committee members for judging on merit, for not taking into account skin color or gender.
Yet I don’t think I fully understand the authoritarian aspects of woke ideology until after Trump won the 2016 election. In late 2016 and early 2017, I witnessed shocking behavior from my colleagues, who began attacking Republicans, white people, conservatives, and Christians as oppressors. They attacked free speech, saying that some people did not deserve a platform because they were engaging in “hate speech.” I argued that there isn’t a clear definition of what constitutes hate speech; and that the constitution protects all speech, save for incitement to imminent lawless action. For saying this, I was attacked as stupid, a bad person, a “right-winger.” Early in Trump’s administration, one of my colleagues said that political violence was justified as a response to his “evil” policies. While I’m no fan of Trump, I oppose violence—a basic principle I thought that all Americans shared. It was in this context that I became disillusioned with the ideology in which I had been immersed for years.
I decided to seek out and try to understand other points of view, so I read books by authors to whom I had never been exposed, such as F.A. Hayek, Ronald Bork, Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Sowell, and others. I began to read and listen to conservative, classically liberal, and libertarian thinkers—people whose ideas I had never encountered in all my years of so-called “higher” education. I listened with an open mind, and I didn’t see any hatred from these thinkers. On the contrary, I discovered carefully reasoned, evidence-based arguments that had much greater explanatory abilities than anything I’d read in the Critical Social Justice literature.
I realized that Critical Social Justice ideology is not only intellectually vacuous; it is downright dangerous, and that the reason it has captivated so many minds is not because of the strength of its ideas, but because it has succeeded in silencing more reasonable and time-tested principles. If I had encountered a wider variety of ideas in my undergraduate—and especially in my graduate—education, I would have been spared years of being captive to Critical Social Justice ideology; I would likely have changed my field of study to something more practical; I would have matured more quickly in understanding the complex, and sometimes tragic, nature of human behavior; and I would have developed a more rational, sustainable understanding of how to live in the world as a decent person, outside of the narrow framework of being an activist for “social justice.” If Critical Social Justice ideology had been presented in a more intellectually diverse educational landscape, I would have been able to properly assess the strengths and weaknesses of Critical Social Justice arguments. Sadly, American universities are, for the most part, not marketplaces of ideas, but mere echo chambers.
It is an obvious fact that all civilizations must pass on their values to the young; if they do not, or if the young are taught different values, then the civilization cannot sustain itself. It is a great shame that an essential site for the transmission of civilizational values—academia—was lost decades ago. As early as 1951, William F. Buckley observed that Yale University was no longer producing graduates who had a commitment to fundamental American values. The advancement of Critical Social Justice ideology has been well documented at this point, so it is not necessary to trace that history here. Suffice it to say that our universities are so infected with Critical Social Justice ideology that they are probably not salvageable at this point.
Those who are attempting to preserve an existing system—in this case preserving the classical liberal principles of American society—have a natural disadvantage when they encounter people, even a small group, who seek, with fanatical devotion, to dismantle that system and replace it with another social order. Nassim Taleb makes this point well in his observation about minority rule: “It suffices for an intransigent minority…to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.” The good news is that it is still possible at this point that another faction of equally committed people actively resisting Critical Social Justice ideology—people who fervently defend the values upon which America was founded—can sustain the liberal social order.
However, people committed to liberal values have many significant disadvantages in this fight. They are generally older, having come of age at a time before Critical Social Justice ideology was dominant, and when strong liberal norms—specifically values of free speech and liberty—prevailed throughout society, whereas the majority of Millennials and Generation Z are heavily woke. Liberals are committed to Enlightenment values of reasoned debate, pursuit of truth, the scientific method, fact-based analysis, and treating people as individuals, not as groups. In contrast, the woke view these Enlightenment values as a white supremacist project; wokeness advances primarily through underhanded tactics: histrionic open letters that accuse ideological opponents as traumatizing and even threatening the very existence of people of color, cancel culture, flash mobs, protests that sometimes devolve into riots, and so forth. Worse, the entrenchment of Critical Social Justice ideology in academia, mass and social media companies, philanthropic foundations, corporate human resources departments, federal and state administrative bureaucracies, and Silicon Valley—combined with surveillance technology—points toward the emergence of a social credit system similar to what exists now in China. Liberals, in short, are bringing the proverbial knife to a gun fight. But we must fight. There is no other choice.
In closing, I want to offer some thoughts on how to defeat Critical Social Justice ideology. If we want to understand why this ideology is winning over the young, we have to understand its appeal. American culture is becoming increasingly secular, which means that more young people don’t have a faith tradition, and social justice ideology is, as many have discussed, filling a religious void. The woke have a messianic complex, a (if you’ll excuse the pun, millenarian) goal to remake society, and view anyone who is opposed to their project not as simply having a different worldview, but as evil. My intuition is that once Critical Social Justice becomes increasingly entrenched as the dominant cultural ideology—especially because of its totalitarian and censorious nature—young people will instinctively begin to rebel and seek out other ideas. This, in fact, seems to be happening in Generation Z already. As a result, there will be a revitalization of classical liberalism, necessitating people who are versed in it to serve as teachers and mentors, but there will be much damage done to our institutions and country in the meantime.
There is so little viewpoint diversity in academia that students don’t even realize that what they are being taught is an ideology, not factual analysis. As Niall Ferguson accurately put it, “North American academia is in the grip of a hideous mania, a cross between the early-modern witch craze and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, in which implacable zealots conduct grotesque show trials, innocent individuals have their reputations, careers and sanity destroyed, and everyone else cowers, terrified that they will be next to be ‘canceled.’” (Source: a blurb from Quillette’s new book, Panics and Persecutions). The American public university system—especially humanities and social sciences—is a cancer on society, as it is teaching students to hate their country and its core values. This is not to say that there shouldn’t be academic critiques of the country. On the contrary, critiques help to improve society. But we have reached a point where there are hardly any academics left to transmit the basic principles of the country.
Heterodox Academy is doing great work to highlight the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy. Their research has shown that professors who lean left outnumber conservative professors by a ratio of nine to one. (Source: “Democratic professors outnumber Republican ones by 9 to 1 ratio, according to new data” | The College Fix). As a result, leftist ideology—most commonly Critical Social Justice—dominates the intellectual culture, and hiring committees carefully select for only one type of diversity among their faculty hires (meaning only valued victim groups), in addition to those who already agree with their ideology. Unless non-woke people structure their application materials and writing samples to appear to follow the Critical Social Justice ideology, I don’t see any inroads for non-leftist scholars to find academic positions. For the few non-leftists in academia who sit on hiring committees, they need to take a stand—as Professor Dorian Abbot at the University of Chicago recently did—for only hiring the most qualified candidates, without regard to their sex, race, color, ethnicity, or any other immutable characteristic.
One of the most urgent needs is the development of a grassroots movement for intellectual diversity on campus, spearheaded by students, alumni, parents, and concerned citizens. I hope that existing conservative, centrist, or libertarian organizations can help to facilitate this movement by providing organizational and logistical support at campuses throughout the country. Everyone should take a close look at their state’s public universities’ Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiatives to see if intellectual diversity is included. If it is not, then the obvious first step is to advocate for the inclusion of intellectual diversity. Concerned taxpayers, students, parents, and alumni, working with the elected officials in those university districts, if necessary, need to ensure that universities have intellectual diversity in humanities and social sciences course offerings. If intellectual diversity is included in the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity initiative (in my experience, most of these initiatives include at least a brief reference to intellectual diversity), then work can be done to survey students to see if they feel that intellectual diversity is represented, particularly in their humanities and social sciences courses. Heterodox Academy has published relevant survey data on the dearth of intellectual diversity in these fields.
If America has any chance of continuing the classical liberal values upon which it was founded, then students who have a commitment to these values have to enter the teaching profession—as doctoral students in education, as administrators, and as public school teachers. Critical pedagogy, and more specifically critical race theory, are the dominant discourses controlling all levels in American schools of education, so students need to tread lightly and assent, at least outwardly, to Critical Social Justice ideology. Once in the classroom, however, teachers should reject all pressures to teach Critical Social Justice, and especially critical race theory, because it is an inherently racist ideology and because it instantiates the problem—racism—that it purports to solve. Critical race theory also needs to be resisted because it, as its own proponents assert, “questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.” (Delgado and Stefancic, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction). Teachers should take a stand for fighting racism within liberalism, not by adopting critical race theory. If there is not already a nonprofit organization devoted to assisting non-woke students to enter the teaching profession—again, at all levels, as professors of education, as administrators, and as public school teachers—then one should be organized immediately. This could also be a special project for existing right- or libertarian-leaning organizations.
Another important project should be the revival of Western civilization and Great Books courses, at all levels of education, but most critically in the universities. In 1964, 15 of the 50 premier universities in America required students to take a survey of Western civilization. All 50 offered the course, and nearly all of them (41) offered it as a way to satisfy some requirement. (Source: New York Post, by Ashley Thorne “The drive to put Western civ back in the college curriculum,” March 29, 2016). But since 1987, when Jesse Jackson led 500 students around Stanford University protesting the requirement that undergraduates take a course in Western Civilization, which they denounced as Eurocentric, white-male indoctrination, most colleges have eliminated Western civ courses for diversity or multiethnic course requirements. An excellent example of a Western civ curriculum can be found in the James Madison program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, which is dedicated to “exploring enduring questions of American constitutional law and Western political thought.” Another avenue is to look into funding institutes for education in Western civilization as a new department at extant colleges and universities.
I would love to see crowd-sourced funds used to construct a beautiful classical building adjacent to one of the ugliest college campuses in the country, preferably one composed entirely of postwar Brutalist buildings. I imagine that students whose spirits are continually depressed by attending classes in the midst of such hideous architecture would feel intrigued to enter such a beautiful building. Once inside, they might learn that there is, in fact, such a thing as beauty; that it matters, and that Critical Social Justice ideology can never build anything beautiful; it can never, in fact, build anything at all—it can only destroy. Once inside that building, students might become interested in registering for a course on Western civilization, a course in which all thought is permitted, in which no one is threatened with cancellation: a microcosm of what a university environment used to be. In this way, we might plant and nurture the seed of resistance to the increasing totalitarianism of Critical Social Justice.
In the long term, it is going to be necessary to create more universities devoted to classical education, not indoctrination into Critical Social Justice ideology, as well as more K-12 private and charter schools in the classical tradition because university schools of education have been training “social justice” educators for decades now, so Critical Social Justice ideology is now in the K-12 public schools. At a policy level on this problem, we need avenues for teacher certification outside of the existing teacher colleges, which are wholly committed to critical pedagogy and other failed approaches. Forcing every licensed teacher (usually for state jobs) to undergo ideological training to gain licensure is not only a problem but should be illegal. At the personal level, my advice to everyone with kids who can afford to do so is to pull your kids out of the public schools immediately and enroll them in private schools, or home school. Although home schooling has already begun to come under attack, it is still a viable option—at least for now. In the future, homeschooling will come under increased scrutiny and I believe there will be attempts to render it illegal. I realize that not everyone can afford to home school or send their kids to private schools (many of which are not safe from Critical Social Justice, either). I strongly recommend that all parents emphasize the value of vocational training programs for their children as avenues to career paths that pay well and offer a great deal of autonomy.
My hope is that new immigrants to America will increasingly speak out against Critical Social Justice ideology as an American instantiation of what is called, in other contexts, tribalism—a form of corruption that has damaged many countries. Far from being a bastion of white supremacy, America’s liberal values are what have attracted people from all countries to undergo great hardship to come here, precisely because this is one of the few places in which ordinary people can exercise their talents to achieve a standard of living that is impossible in most of the world. It is my fervent hope that more American college students—especially the “woke” who rail against their own country as evil—would be required to spend a semester abroad in a developing country in order to gain some much-needed perspective on the struggles people face who were not fortunate enough to be born into such an “oppressive” place as America.
Lastly, I have focused mostly on academia and education because this is the sector I know best, but I strongly urge everyone, from all walks of life, to embrace your sense of humor (a quality that is conspicuously absent in woke culture). Wokeness should continue to relentlessly mocked and parodied through meme culture (Andrew Doyle’s Titania McGrath is a great example). Just as important: Be courageous. Stand up for the beliefs that have made America a great country. If you hear people treating others as members of groups, articulate the importance of treating people as individuals. As Jordan Peterson put it, “The smallest minority is the individual.” If you encounter people treating others badly because of their gender or skin color, say that this behavior is morally wrong. If you see people attempting to “cancel” others, articulate why this is a terrible way to treat others. If you witness attacks on freedom of speech and advocacy of censorship, or if you meet people who are in favor of “hate speech” laws, or laws to combat “misinformation” (a code word for non-leftist ideas), articulate why freedom of speech is an absolutely essential and non-negotiable value. If you hear people discussing why they think socialism is great, take a stand for free markets and the prosperity they have produced. If you hear people calling for retributive justice and political violence, push against it and discuss why violence is never acceptable. If you encounter attacks on meritocracy, make a case for why merit is essential to the advancement of individuals and societies. I think a lot of liberals, like me, generally, if not naively, assumed that the liberal values underpinning America would simply continue throughout our lives, but these values are under attack and they need to be vigorously and unapologetically defended. Our civilization is at stake and the hour is late.
198 comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE
The link above will take you to the flash mob of Handel’s Messiah.
If you do not know why I am providing this link, please “Cntl-F” (Hold down the “cntl” key while tapping on the “f” key), then write “flash mob” into the text box that appears on your screen. You will be taken to the point in this opinion piece, where the author includes “flash mobs” as being part of woke culture.
I think that all the musicians giving free concerts would be surprised to find themselves described as part of a conspiracy to undermine freedom.
If you want a day full of joy and wonder, watch all the videos of flash mobs that have been posted on YouTube.
I think she means “Robert Bork” not “Ronald Bork”.
I haven’t checked in on New Discourses in a hot minute, only occasionally seeing some vods from James Lindsay. There’s another name that shares that same non-place in my mind that pops up in this article, the Heterodox Academy, a project which I thought was dead.
I’m going to be blunt because these days I don’t have as much time for myself as I would like. The only answer to the communist problem, what you euphemistically refer to as ‘Critical Social Justice,’ is to begin by repealing the 19th amendment, something the author of this article and likely every single other person here reading this comment would rankle at the mere thought of, demonstrating that all of you are no better than, just as much a part of the problem as, the people you are afraid of.
You’ll denounce that idea, and me, as ‘reactionary’ even though 55% of women per exit polling data explicitly support socialism, and in society, women always get what they want unless they have far less power than men. Those are all incontrovertible facts that even a giant dumb-dumb like myself can easily defend against the sharpest of rhetoricians because I have all the facts on my side, and you people are just as immune to facts as communists are because you’re cut from the same intellectual and ideological mold, and I can prove that too. To begin with, why don’t you go see what Jonathan Haidt has to say about gun control and firearm ownership. Yeah, some defender of constitutional principles he is. I bet neither he nor a single person who will ever see this has ever read a single line from the Federalist Papers.
I said the same thing to James Lindsay that I’m about to say here; liberalism is what got us here in the first place. Liberalism has zero effective defense against communism because communism claims to offer, in a utilitarian manner, the fulfillment of liberalism’s goals. That’s why liberals have to say ‘communism/socialism doesn’t work,’ because if they ever concluded that it did work, they’d have no choice but to assent to communist ideology.
You people only realized there was ever a fight going on 40 years after it was done and over. We’re so far past the point of ‘maybe we can still fix this by presenting our better ideas and counter-arguments’ that it’s laughable to even think about that. There are currently people being tortured in black sites for the crime of being allowed into the capitol building by police. A year ago, the Biden administration forced farmers to destroy literally tons of crops and livestock on the pain of having agent orange spread all over their fields, and much more recently, in the last 2 months, over 30 major food production plants in the US burned down under “mysterious circumstances,” and people are now talking about food shortages. Biden utterly destroys our ability to produce energy, tries to force everyone into electric vehicles, and you people are still trying to defend the marketplace of ideas. This country is screwed, and it is the fault of people like you. The only hope any of us have now is to not get swept under by the coming tide.
I am always, and increasingly so, more than a little bit astonished by the difficulty in establishing a reasonable definition of what hate speech actually is.
I prefer to utilize a simple concept of human nature, mixed liberally with the psychology of human conflict.
I usually start with this:
If a speaker is hated – well then, their speech is probably going to be hated, too. I have read enough Black and Female literature over the years to understand how this works.
It starts with a decided bias or prejudice toward the person speaking.
This is human behavior as old as the human race itself. It is nothing new, and not really all that complicated. We’ve just learned how to dress it up in faux complications that don’t really need to be there.
To further explain the concept –
If the speaker is hated (for who cares what reason?) then their speech is going to be regarded as hateful. Hateful because disagreement, adamantly so, is directed at the speaker’s speech.
This is correct in every aspect. I find all kinds of speech hateful (because I adamantly disagree with what is being spoken).
But the difference is simple. The speech I find hateful is disconnected from any particular moral analysis directed toward the speaker.
The distinction between the two different conclusions is of paramount importance.
It is a thing that most fundamentally educated people in society must understand.
Otherwise, we are left with a situation in which anybody, and I mean anybody, can disguise their hatred for another human being simply by calling out their speech as hate speech.
For Christ’s sake. They could be dictating their grocery shopping list. They could be commenting on the weather. It simply does not matter. The sound of them is hateful (for whatever reason, who cares?)
And so do the exalted chosen ones employ the cheapest of all tricks to attack and silence anyone who would voice an opinion of dissent. With impunity.
We are witnessing the radicalization of the political left and at the same time, more people of the center-left are living the boat. By doing so, they believe to make their mea culpa, and everything will be fine. Some, who were already radicalized, tell their story about how they have helped to sapper the structure of our society. They all ask for forgiveness. ‘Hey, you see; I’m no more with them. I’m a good guy now. Ok?’ Not ok, for at least two reasons.
1) They never acknowledge the values issue of the ideologies which convince them to participate in bad actions. …
2) They won’t put the same energy and commitment to help to produce a free and viable civilization as they did to undermine it.
Do you want forgiveness? Fine, but work harder to acknowledge why you were wrong, the root of it, …
We are used to say that most people do not take sides, but that’s not entirely true. They make an assessment of which side is the most dangerous… It means that our openness is seen as a weakness that one can take advantage of….
http://letter2tep.net/letter.php#x534
Thank you Samantha for this article! I had a similar journey, though thankfully went through law school to complete my juris doctor. I say thankfully, because law school certainly was NOT an echo chamber and I enjoyed being challenged on my ideas there. However, I came out of school working for a left-leaning social justice non-profit as a more traditional liberal lawyer. I noticed how CRT had crept into our workplace and then rapidly accelerated from when I first started in 2018. After listening to other traditional liberal thinkers, conservatives, and libertarians in 2020, I realized I was less liberal and more libertarian in political thought.
CRT is trying to dismantle society by attacking first and foremost culture (and through that education), but secondly and insidiously, the Constitution and our entire political and legal framework. We can reconstruct culture (and we must), but if the Constitution falls, I fear for our country’s future. And we already see the degradation of justice with judges and lawyers in the court system, and obviously with policymakers at both the state and federal level. We all know politicians are corrupt. But when the courts, our failsafe, has been CRT’d America will fall. Unfortunately we are nearing that horizon.
Keep speaking out & developing culture! For those out there interested: run for office. Go to law school. Start businesses. Create art. TALK to your neighbor. Send them Thomas Sowell videos (he got me with his humor and intellect), whatever it takes!
Thank you Samantha for your excellent article. It gives me hope that not all is lost yet. You have shared poignant personal experiences (this confirms your woke training ironically), put them into the wider context and offered an approach if not a solution to fighting this plague on society. I too have been taking the values I grew up with for granted. I live in Britain and British universities too, especially in the arts, humanities and social sciences, are breeding and brain washing factories for these evil ideas. While my husband and I have four degrees and numerous professional qualifications between us, our son, despite being gifted in mathematics has decided to train as a carpenter and for this I am grateful. Dinners in our house are relaxed, full of lively conversation and humour and while we might not all agree on everything, we respect each other’s right to have different opinions and to express these views. I’m sorry that you have to hide your views to progress, I too am now very careful when I speak out, in fact I’m even careful when I write my annual Christmas letter to friends and family. A left wing member of our House of Lords recently suggested that all males have an enforced curfew after 6 pm so that women can be safer on our streets. Of course, this kind of legislation wouldn’t work, because any man caught outside after 6 pm could say he identifies as a woman. Critical social justice theory ideas are all you say and more, they are a collective insanity.
While I appreciate what you’re trying do, I think that this endeavor is doomed to fail.
The commitment to abstract liberalism we enjoyed in the 20th century could only exist through the inertia of reactionary impulses which ultimately had no foundation. This eruption of errors are only the natural conclusions to first premises which both parties share but which conservatives are unable to see.
This is why a common characteristic of leftists/progressives is their intelligence and careful attention to details. They are deriving valid conclusions from false premises. That is why they work so hard. They are blinded from the beginning, not at any intermediate stage in the process.
Conservatives, by contrast, generally argue from true premises, but use weak or invalid arguments. Your soul is such that you recognize certain things as good or evil, but you have already been deprived of the means by which you could express the truth through reason. Rather, you were never even provided with those means.
I have seen this so many times. I have been in academia too. Here is how the process goes.
1. Authentic religion obtains among a people to some degree.
2. The soul of authentic religion disappears and leaves a husk with no essential foundation (bourgeois morality and unspoken norms). This husk is everything labeled right wing.
3. Over centuries, this “right-wing” gradually but inexorably crumbles as the left holds the right to its own hypocrisy. Furthermore, the left confuses bourgeois morality for authentic religion (which is rather excusable, as bourgeois morality hides behind authentic religion and uses its language).
4. Left wing ideology, purified of everything but the deific (ultimately satanic) exaltation of the human will, parasitizes all vitality and destroys all goodness in a society until it is annihilated.
We are in the late stages of step 4. Any form of authority is intolerable. Authority is identified with oppression, the only desire which is immoral is desire which violates the desires of other human beings.
The only way out of this is to return to explicit belief in a God knowable through reason, to natural law (a system of objective morality derived from nature itself), and to certain divinely revealed truths, particularly original sin. The Marxist denial of original sin is the cause of all this. If our nature was not wounded and imperfect, if it was not fallen, we would have no need for God. We could remake the world in the image of our own desires. Paradise would be possible on earth, and it would be incumbent on every individual to achieve it by any means possible.
Without God, the human will and its arbitrary impulses must become absolutely sovereign.
But God alone is absolutely sovereign. Only God can save this culture. Human beings are unable to save themselves.
A very well thought out response, though I hope you are wrong that this is doomed to fail. I have felt we need to return our education system to one that has as its central focus production of moral citizens. This feeling only intensified after I read “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” by Kipling. We must get this right; we have been bequeathed the greatest treasure ever in human history. It is upon us to ensure that gift is passed on to subsequent generations.
This, dear readers, is truth.
Your pessimism betrays a lack of faith, perhaps?
I love the idea of mandatory travel (to less wealthier countries especially) to broaden the student’s vision but I would really love to have students spend the summer in flyover country, on a farm or running a hardware store. I want them to meet people outside of their class and “religion.”
@pj…I have thought that for awhile too….The leftified, or gang affiliated city kids working a summer on a farm in middle America. Knowing where at least some of their food comes from, the work that goes into it would be a good thing. Even though much is all mechanized, it’s still a different perspective. A very different environment.
Recently, I managed to take a wonderful 6,000+ mile road trip across country, and through middle America. It’s beautiful, and ragged, and full of sometimes bright, sometimes rusty, and falling apart Americana.
I highly recommend supporting small town middle America. If possible, go and spend some money at a farmers market, a little diner, an antique store. I couldn’t believe the overstuffed antique stores I saw. :-O
PS. That’s one way of keeping our country going along.
“Ronald Bork”
Do you mean the late Judge Robert Bork?
cool article but please fix the numerous grammatical and syntax errors present throughout the article before making an appeal to my intellect
The article talks about how corrosive cancel culture is and you complain about a pseudonym in an academic.
Get real.
Your sense of priority is odd. If you are distracted by only the physical, you will not see the truth. Do you give voice only to those with perfect grammar? An appeal to intellect should be open to understand the meaning from all who speak, write and take action. Cancel elsewhere.
oh go away
Yes, but academia is lost.
We can hope it will be saved, but it has already gone.
What can any individual do? Stay away from academia. If you have children try to find a rational school or home school if you can.
If already in academia be a spy. Send reports to antiwoke activists who have large audiences. Be a whistle blower.
The rest of us, join any organisation that is anti-woke. If there isn’t one, start one. Subscribe to and pay someone who is fighting for liberty.
Make contacts with like minded persons and create organisations that will resist authoritarian postmodernist madness.
Their beliefs are a house of cards built on sand, only sustainable by suppression of speech for fear that a free breath will cause it to tumble.
Absolutely spot on. The last paragraph should be carved in granite and preserved for all time. Well done Samantha Jones
Fan fiction. The author may or may not have legitimate reasons to withold identity, but in so doing, she also withholds credibility.
It is notable that she cannot resist including her right-wing ideological bent in the latter part of the text.
Fail.
The topic is legitimate and deserves better treatment.
I’m confused. Right-wing ideological bent? I believe you have missed the entire point. Intellectual (and political) diversity is required in society to defeat the awful ideological forces she describes. Both the Left … and the Right are needed. If you don’t understand that, then I don’t know why you’ve joined New Discourses.
There is no “right-wing ideological bent”. Only an SJW would say that. What there is in the essay is open-minded and clear thinking, which a lot of people, like you, do not care for. When a person is open to thinking from both sides, this is the true mark of liberalism. But SJW losers cannot evaluate conservatives, because if they do, they realize how stupid many of their ideas are, and how right conservatives are in many areas.
One tends to think rather less of this sort of comment when it comes from someone providing exemplary perfection in the hypocrisy Honours Degree – withholding their own id and telling the author off for her pseudonym!!
God save us all from woke hypocrites. Dear me! Just catching my breath..
– At least we can enjoy laughing at them, an emotional indicator of good health that I’ve noticed does not appear often in the faces of the Woke and the otherwise perfectly politically correct. 😉
How surprising that someone who uses that particular image sees “right wing” in everything and misses the libertarian and classical liberal aspects promoted through the article. I know it gets all religious but since when was religion automatically “right wing”. That’s a rather odd view of the world, one that annoys even an old life long atheist and anti-theist like myself. Theism like atheism has been infected by social justice. Holding an irrational belief in a deity doesn’t exempt people from the cancer. This is not a right-left theist-atheist divide issue. Fact is that social justice is a religion, a cult if you prefer, one that has the ability to infect and destroy in atheist and theist circles, and creating nothing of worth in it’s destructive path.
Not all is lost though, I do agree with you that credibility is traded with anonymity, but, only to the claimed credentials. Where a name doesn’t matter is in assessing the content, you can do that without a name. Where a name does matter is when people require identifiers to use in their efforts to destroy people’s lives. Which side of that fence are you sitting?
It seems you’re shaming the author to reveal their identity while failing to address any points made. I get this when people assume Flora can’t be a man’s name and try to dismiss me as a fake (very inclusive and accepting, woke people). This comment stinks of needing to hunt down blasphemers. For some reason I am given to believing you came and commented in bad faith.
Fail.
This topic does deserve better, it deserves people wiling to discuss it. It does not deserve people taking cheap shots at dismissing the author.
This article speaks with clarity and precision about this issue. This careful analysis of the Critical Social Justice ideology is poignant with many practical ways to DO SOMETHING. May we all take just one of these suggestions and make a difference in our universities. Many thanks to the author for a well-crafted and well-researched piece.
One thing that is continually missed about the rise of CT and wokedom is that it’s is a very middle class concern. That’s how it’s gained such a grip in such a short space of time. Even those in academia and the media who’s backgrounds are not originally middle class have become so due to the circles they move in. That’s one of the weirdest things about woke politics, despite the supposed aim of pushing up oppressed minorities it happily perpetuates class privilege, as either those born into it can publicly self-flagellate (an entirely performative exercise, they’re sacrificing nothing in doing so), or use other aspects of their identity as a shield to hide either their naked self-interest (after all, got to keep that book/public speaking/consultancy money coming in) or their plain old fashioned bigotry. That’s why we see middle class people of varying hues telling dirt poor white people to check their privilege, and misogynist middle aged m-to-f late transitioners dominating the trans rights movement while toxifying feminism and throwing child protection concerns to the wind.
This is a really interesting point.
Can you share the data that led you to draw these conclusions?
No data, just thinking. It’s a conservative thing – thinking carefully, drawing conclusions. Foreign to you, doubtless.
America has never really had an aristocracy. No Dukes, Earls, Princes, Queens, Countesses. No royal blood. Just rich people.
Because of the fact that some 85% of the nation might deign to think of themselves as middle class (descending from above and ascending from below) this appears to be the preferred default of the majority.
Interestingly, smart people who have been studying affirmative action for some few decades – are often heard to remark that the existing help is designed to to move upward people who are mostly already there.
The elephant in the room is a decidedly growing underclass. Which has taken on a more multigenerational tone over the past several decades.
it is certainly true that ideological playtime is often for those who can afford it. The working class, holding down two or three jobs with very little time off – don’t have that luxury. Strange, when you realize that for all this barking about ‘justice’, nobody really speaks for them.
So rather than dismantle what form of classism has tumbled into the 21st century , we’re busy hiding it in plain sight.
Perhaps nothing has illustrated this better than this hallowed time of Covid. It provides a stark contrast – between all those merrily tapping keys in their 4 and 5 bedroom home office houses (often peopled by no more than 2 or 3 inhabitants) and who yell the loudest for regulations that will keep everything exactly the same going forward, in order to take advantage of the fact that 14 months and counting of full pay and benefits, and fortunes saved because there is no commute, and shopping opportunities have shrunk.
This reality compared to a working class life, is a latter day Prince and the Pauper. The contrast is startling. Front line workers come to mind, just for starters. And except for high end medical experts, I can’t think of much else in the upper echelons accepting real risk.
Smart minds contemplate the future cost of all this economic irresponsibility. And when serious consequences arrive? How quaint and pathetic – that we’ll still be quibbling over pronouns, micron aggressions (you need a microscope that big to spot one) and how to enhance one’s life on social media.
While a roof over one’s head and food on the table takes on real meaning not seen for 80 years.
How quickly we forget.
With Kamal Harris in the VP position, a proponent of Critical Social Justice ideology, it will be #1 on her agenda for the next four years.
How does it feel to realise that defending your position, however right you may be, risks being publicly vilified by a social justice movement?
Men learned that one a long time ago, predominantly from women’s studies related ideologies.
Welcome to our world!
I think there are many great points in the article.
However, I have trouble reconciling the following two statements in the article.
“I write under a pseudonym because, if my colleagues were to find out about my criticisms of this field, I would be unable to find any employment in academia.”
“Just as important: Be courageous. Stand up for the beliefs that have made America a great country.”
I don’t see a problem with reconciliation of those comments. One can express courageous opinions and continue to call out the problems with “wokeness” without sacrificing your profession. Unfortunately in the current environment, the possibility of being “cancelled” or the subject of extrajudicial mob “justice” is real and for those of us not independently wealthy on whom our families depend upon us remaining employed, the risk is not just about ourselves but our families. That statement, however, does reflect the reality that in the current academic environment, one can be impacted for having the wrong views (no promotion, no tenure, exclusion from important meetings, etc.). It is people like the writer who can serve the cause well, even while writing under a pseudonym.
Bingo.
It is a tough row to hoe, but if she will not stand up, the call for others to do so, in was that disallow anonymity (as all ways that could be expected to be change-making must), seems a bit disingenuous.
Your confusion and hatred for her is obvious. What you want is her identification, so that you and your harridan SJW CRT friends could attack her.
I have a close friend who is in a Department of a romance language. Everyone there, but the person, hates Trump, conservatives, and reality. The person is very very very quiet, because the person would never get tenure.
I hope your friend is holding up ok.
I get so bummed when I read about things like this.
I am the “artsy fartsy” type, love fine art, good literature, theatre, dance, all that stuff. So, you can imagine the Trump hatred I’ve been around.
I turned off a lot of the “liberal” radio many years ago I listened to when I heard the subject of “race” coming up more, and more, and it seemed obsessive, or oppressive somehow. I hadn’t heard of CRT.
Fast forward into the explosion of 2020, and I was suspicious about BLM when everyone around me was supporting them. I haven’t said much either since whenever I do bring something up around these issues that doesn’t always agree with them, it doesn’t go too well, or I am given that implication of being more “ignorant”, not as well informed.
The irony is of course they have no idea what I am reading, and paying attention too. They don’t care to know.
One friend has a daughter at Berkeley , soon to graduate, and my friend thinks socialism is the way to go. I have no idea why. She’s not always the easiest person to talk to when we disagree.
I am still trying to figure out how all the boomers, and younger people who I run into think socialism would be so great when history shows what a wretched thing it certainly would be.
She is standing up for her beliefs by writing this excellent essay. The fact that she has to use a fake name doesn’t change that. It actually emphasizes the problem, as she points out.
If your family is strongly committed to religious values of any kind, it is now obvious that universities are a clear and present danger to your child emerging from any university and remaining strongly committed to your religious values.
Should the goal not be, at all ages, for your children to remain strongly committed to their own religious values, instead of your own?
At what age would children be considered to be adult in your religion? At what age human beings?
The transmission of religious values is from one generation to the next. My analogy is that of a car-when the transmission breaks down, you have to buy a new car. Children in my faith reach majority at 12 ( female) and 13 ( male) but the transmission of values does not cease , rather it only begins in earnest at that point via the home , community, schools and summer camps
Two questions your comment raises….
1. at what age do woke proponents think children are old enough to be taught woke values, (including why)
2. How does wokeism encourage children to be committed to their own (anything) values, including non wokeists ones if they should choose to do so?
Given that adults (let alone children) are frequently cancelled for “choosing” non wokeist views the words glass houses and stones spring to mind.
Steven, maybe you should give a presentation in your community, preferably in a local house of worship, in order to inform parents and young people of the danger of universities.
The woke onslaught ,which certainly has strong components rooted in classical feminist ideology, environmental extremism, Marxism and anti Semitism, is an issue of some concern in our community,. However, far too many of the so called powers that be think that even after K-12 in a day school/yeshiva setting combined with summer camps and a year or two in Israel, the average high school graduate is sufficiently prepared and inoculated in all respects for the woke onslaught both in and out of the classroom on a college campus. The anecdotal and sociological data that I have seen , read and heard would raise serious questions as to the validity of that assumption and conclusion.
I have blogged and will continue to blog extensively elsewhere about this issue which I compare to the French relying on the Maginot Line in response to the Nazi Blitzkrieg as a means of not dealing with the challenge of the time , as opposed to the challenge of the past. I think that our community has to realize that the woke onslaught is a clear and present danger to our families , values and community and realize that the contemporary college campus is a very dangerous environment . There should be some serious analysis of means of making a living that do not entail endangering one’s faith commitment.
Steve, I think you’re absolutely right. I come from an MO community and though I now live in Israel, I have an idea of what’s going on back home.
Is there some way we can share ideas? I do think a Ted-style talk could be useful. המצב הוא מסוכן
IF we don’t address these issues by whatever means, the MO world will be seriously at risk.
Any such talk in the MO community should involve parents students rabbis and educators who are familiar with what the woke world has created on college campuses as well as parents who erred on the side of caution and refused to send their children to such institutions
It’s interesting that you mentioned classical feminist ideology as a starting point for woke. I tend to agree with that opinion.
I couldn’t help noticing the “full circle” feeling of listening to an advocate of feminism begin to realise what the work she once admired has led to.
What the auther describes was experienced by men during the early days of second wave feminism and beyondr own ac. Now her own activist values are being superceded by the next generation who, in turn, see her in the same light.
I sympathise with her, because I know how harmful it can be.
My apologies if this post appears several times. I submitted it previously but it gets to “awaiting moderation” but no further.
I see what you present here in my granddaughter that just came out of college “all enlightened”. And, I first saw it while in college in the ’60’s when my mechanical drawing professor began talking about an expanded welfare system. Apparently he felt drawing social concepts was equivalent to drawing mechanical images.
In my mechanical drawing class in 1967-1968, we just drew nuts and bolts. I was lucky.
As an Indian-Australian who has lived in Australia for 40 years after completing my PhD, I am appalled at the transformation that has taken place in this country as has happened in the USA. I find it extraordinary that the educated people in the West want to take their countries on the socialist path in spite of the evidence from the largest experiments in human history in the Soviet Union, China, India etc in the 20th century that socialism is a failure. I lived the best part of my life in India at a time when it was a socialist country, albeit a benign one. Until the early 1990s when India opened up and became a free market economy, we had pretty much everything in short supply because everything was Government-owned and there was no comptetion. For a landline telephone, we had to wait for two years, as the handsets were manufactured by a government-owned telephone company (for which I worked for). Thankfully India is moving in the opposite direction to that of the West economically, although there is no lack of SJWs trying to bring the malaise afflicting the West into the country. I am grateful that I came to Australia when there was no wokeness, and I came up simply through merit, otherwise I would forever wonder whether I was selected on merit or because my skin colour. The Chairwoman of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) said some time ago that ABC needed diversity because “we are not all white”. In one stroke, she devalued all black and coloured staff of ABC of their merit and worth. I am left wondering how many of the black and coloured staff at ABC were selected for their “diversity factor” than for pure merit. The SJWs are suffocating and destroying countries around the world, not just USA. In your article you can replace “western countries” for “USA” and you would be 100% accurate. Europe is a basket case. As an Easterner, I have no problem with Western Civilisation, and in fact very appreciative of what it has given to the world. No civilisation is free from past misdeeds, but justice does not come from reverse misdeeds. Australia has just changed some words in the national anthem to read “we are one and free” in place of “we are young and free” in response to SJW criticism that “young ” indicated that Australia was born after European settlement and ignored the Aboriginal history. Now we can all go back smugly to the same third world conditions faced by Aboriginals, happy in the self-satisfying feeling that we have achieved something for them. Really?
Woke culture is no socialism.
Even if it were, you need to build coalitions to defeat illiberalism, not create more division.
If you are seeking illiberal fellow travelers, you may well find good company in the woke.
This article is a rather curious missive. On one hand, it views something called the social justice left as a threat against the very existence of the US, calling for free speech, but likewise calling for this movement to be countered at all costs – mainly because it’s own agenda is Christian, Republican, libertarian or classically liberal. Then there are sprinkles of anti-modernism and overtures to build classical facades in place of brutalist buildings (that no one builds anymore). Overall is comes across and unfocused bilge. It suffers from the same sort of black and white thinking it frames its opponents of. One explanation for that might be that US politics appears to only come in two flavours, whereas elsewhere, leftists and libertarians would fall into their own camp or party. The author accuses these ‘wreckers’ of trying to upturn the social order, while at the same time the outgoing president has been trying to enact the same thing under conservative colours.
This big muddle, where the US finds itself, may have existed before in other forms, but certainly seems to be coming out of the woodwork as the sun sets on American dominance. In the process, it no longer even sells the idea of democracy or effective governance since it frames its opposition as the personification of evil.
The real threat behind the so-called social justice movement is the rise of popular post-modernism. Though, whereas postmodernism was funny and ironic, the result here is tragic. The questioning of scientific truth is not reserved to those on the left. Sokal and Bricmont’s takedown of post-modernism , written 20 years ago, was written from a left perspective. They thought weakening the idea of truth would only disempower the poor.
It’s evident there is a double game being played here. The article claims to be the friend of enlightenment values, but religious groups in the US in particular are broadly anti-science. This has likewise been the case with anti-climate change voices and more recently in responses to the pandemic and the anti-vaccination movement.
Pinning this purely on the left would be fatuous, since both sides seem to be undermining facts to serve and suit their own ideological positions. Flip-flopping to visions of the classical past or the yellow brick road of equality (only in some narrow gender neutral language sense) are both signs of intellectual exhaustion and a polity increasingly adrift from reality.
Samantha Jones needs to reveal her (or his?) name so that we can verify her claims. When did we start accepting the claims of an individual who is masked behind a pseudonym? Would people posting here accept claims made by a pseudonymous lapsed conservative? And I’m sorry to say that there’s a pretty flagrant red flag in the way that she points the finger at tenured faculty members for the plight of contract/adjunct faculty members. Anyone in academia knows that the cause of that disparity lays not with tenured faculty members but with the budget models handed down by senior university administrators (trained as MBAs and mostly in neoconservative economic policies). Samantha Jones, who are you?
The claims being made here are conservative. No lapse about it.
This adds fuel to the skepticism, which in my view, you rightfully have deployed.
My guess is Samantha Jones is James Lindsay. 😉
If you had the author’s credentials and was afraid of your academic future as well as your ability to live normally without being subjected to the Woke mob, you might also write anonymusly
Question for anyone:
Did anyone here ever think about secondary, tertiary, and quanternary unintended consequences of their actions? Others actions?
Most people (particularly government actors at all levels) never think beyond the immediate future.
On this site, I observe people intellectually dissecting ideas. That, of course, has value. More importantly, what actions have people taken to fight CT?
Seems like a lot of complaining happens here.
It is a hard concept to think about. Can you share your own examples in order to help others do the same?
One starting point would be living a life rooted in individual responsibility and that there is reward and punishment on this planet for what you do or don’t do in any particular instance. But, if you view secular ethics as supreme, you can rationalize the worst possible events
“the reason it has captivated so many minds is not because of the strength of its ideas, but because it has succeeded in silencing more reasonable and time-tested principles.”
CSJ is the bully on the playground. Tough to reason with someone who only speaks ‘fist’.
If this professor is not teaching the professional dogma it would be immediately evident, so is this a dose of hypocrisy?
I fear it is already too late. This ideology has been festering in academia since at least the 1960s. And these are “activist disciplines”, designed to propel a fervor in those who take these programs.
Being human beings, they then chose areas of life and career from which they can best proselytize. Education, social work, health and human services, psychology, political science, journalism, the law, human resources, elected office.
The horses have left the barn.
And they’ve spent decades consolidating power. You’re no fan of Donald Trump. Perhaps that’s because in this year’s presidential race, he received 150 TIMES more negative coverage in the media than Biden did. That’s after 94% or more negative media coverage since he came down the escalator in 2015 to announce his bid for president.
I’m one of the dissidents. Have been for 10 years. I have some modest influence, and as such I’ve been interviewed and profiled by mainstream media. They lie. By omission, by quote mine, by imputation of malice. They chop up what I have said, and fill in the spaces they created with their own imaginings of my intentions.
And the powers that be? Well, I’m banned from Twitter. I annoyed the wrong male feminist. While I did not violate the terms of service, the notice Twitter sent me said they reserve the right to review an account in its entirety to determine if its “primary purpose” is to upset other users. They were able to determine my intentions without ever asking me a single question.
There is no legal recourse. Section 230 liability protection is so blanket that they could openly claim they 86ed my account because I was a woman, or Canadian, or bisexual, and they could not be sued over it.
Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. AND the world’s biggest bookstore. AND one of the world’s biggest print-on-demand “independent” publishers. The vast majority of mainstream news media in the US is owned by just 6 mega-corporations. Zuckerberg and Dorsey and Cooke and the rest? Woke as fuck, either for real, or because wokeness is a useful tool..
Hell, my husband works for a huge critical infrastructure company, and they’ve openly stated the only contractors they’re looking to hire on as employees (with, you know, benefits and job security) are women, blacks and indigenous people. If you’re a white or Asian male, tough luck. This is how they’re able to look good on the whole diversity initiative thing–the contractors don’t count, only employees do.
Laws have been changed. The Canadian government can take your 5 year old kid away from you if you don’t fully indulge their self-identification as trans. A Canadian senator called a distinguished professor of psychology a fascist during a public hearing for objecting to a legal mandate to call someone zi or hen or they or whatever on demand.
The cancer has metastasized. Removing that first tumor won’t do shit. I’m sorry.
Oh, and just to really rub some salt in the wound regarding my husband’s job and their hiring practices.
He works on a floor of 150. 95% of them are men, 93% white/Asian men. Some have been working on contract for more than a decade.
But when they hire that woman who was a contractor for 18 months, and give her a cushy employee position, what’s the first thing they do?
They send her to a two day seminar to educate her on how, as a woman in tech, she’s oppressed. She just got promoted ahead of dozens of men who’ve been there years longer, have more responsibilities and do more complicated and crucial work, but she’s oppressed.
My husband works on a fire-at-will contract. He is his own limited liability corporation. He has to pay out of pocket for worker’s compensation premiums and liability insurance. He does not qualify* for unemployment insurance. He does not get overtime pay, holiday pay or vacation pay. There are no paid sick days, no paid mental health days, and no paid “just whatever” days. He doesn’t get a $150/month stipend to get a gym membership, or massage therapy.
*Actually, he does qualify for some unemployment insurance if he wanted to pay for it. Maternity leave. Just not regular benefits. So the Canadian government will let a woman pay for UI coverage as a contractor to pay her when she chooses to have a baby, but a man can’t pay for UI coverage as a contractor to pay him when his company cuts 5000 jobs and he’s one of them.
But yes. Women are oppressed.
I thought you divorced your husband years and years ago… 😉
“They lie. By omission, by quote mine, by imputation of malice. They chop up what I have said, and fill in the spaces they created with their own imaginings of my intentions.”
I’d be interested in any elaboration of this which you could post here, incl. on any classic examples of any of this, in your experience.
“This ideology has been festering in academia since at least the 1960s.”
May well be, but again, I’d be interested in any elaboration of this.
As your views here are of major interest, tomorrow I may be able to think of other questions for you.
“Critical” is a leftist shibboleth we can forget.
It is another recent attempt of leftists to appear “scientific” among their rampant mysticism.
Yes, the left is a religion and with as much of a claim to science as any other.
“Social Justice” is whatever a leftist says it is according to her fee-feez and it can change several times a minute.
In other words “social justice” is whim.
And whims you have an ocean full of them for every whimsical out there.
For a definition of Justice:
https://courses.aynrand.org/lexicon/justice/
I. Administration of law or equity.
Thesaurus »
1. Maintenance of what is just or right by the exercise of authority or power; assignment of deserved reward or punishment; giving of due deserts.
“Justice, n. : Oxford English Dictionary.” Accessed March 11, 2021. https://oed.com/view/Entry/102198?rskey=iSKYd3&result=1#eid.
For anyone who’s interested in providing themselves with a more classical education:
https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/constitution-101
https://online.hillsdale.edu/courses/great-books-101
are good places to start.
Not possible.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/19/classical-education-almost-impossible-today/
David’s comments validate this articles substance, much to his dismay, I would have to say.
I agree 100% with everything the author says but, unfortunately, it’s gone too far to be stopped by any means other than outright revolution.
Thank you for a very enligthening article. It is much appreciated.
Note:
I wish I could edit the typos in the above post. My apologies. ^^
I meant to mention that when I was in college back in the mid-70s I had to take a social “science” class. On a lark I signed up for a Women’s Studies course. It was taught by a wormy looking little twerp who had worked a summer or two, during college, at Del Monte cannery. Because he’s actually worked in a hot sweaty environment with real working class people he thought he down with the proletariat. The coincidence here, I suppose, is that the book he required us to read was by Shulamith Firestone. Gawd, did I have a hard time sitting there listening to this preening little Marxist spewing all that vile man-hate. Firestone must have been a miserable human. I’ll never forget the part where she referred to giving birth as “shitting a pumpkin.”
You never mentioned local school boards or state boards of education. These local small time politicians are the most susceptible to political pressure. If enough concerned parents would show up at the board meetings and complain about Critical Theory being taught to their kids it could make a difference. I agree, if you can you should pull your kids out of public schools and find a school with a philosophy that you agree with. I wish I had known where this was all heading years ago when we sent our daughter to Catholic schools and then on to UC Berkeley. She’s all good with woke even though I’m not sure she understands how insidious it is. I think she views it as classic liberalism. When I try to tell it’s not she gets so offended I can’t talk to her. That’s all part of the wokeness, I suppose.
If I had a child that was 16 or 17 and thinking about what to do with his or her life, I’m not sure I would recommend college. Not unless there was a clear idea on what he or she wanted to get out of it. A degree in math or the sciences, sure. A degree in the humanities, English, history, social “sciences”, I would have a hard time paying for it.
After this latest election I think the battle is lost and most of us never saw it coming. Like other societies that have gone down the road to Marxism, I’m afraid the US is going to have to learn the lesson the hard way. In some ways it makes me glad that I’m getting old and won’t have to live through much of it.
Well written, albeit long piece. I’ve long been thinking about how to describe my polical leanings as R and D categories don’t work (fiscally conservative, socially liberal) and have been increasingly concerned with the cancel culture and loss of free speech in academia. I like the return to original liberalism Enlightenment principles and might propose myself to be a Liberal Traditionalist.
Looking at what is starting to go on in science as well is quite concerning (math is structurally racist, etc) and if it becomes not possible to use empiric methods to advance technology, the US will crumble as others will.
Wow, Ms. Jones. I don’t think that you should be teaching creative writing. Why? Because from the very start of the article, I was waiting for and wanting your own definition of “Critical Social Justice”, so that I could know what you were really talking about. It never came. You cannot assume (and I hope you know what the army says about that word) the your audience has somehow assimilated all of the denotations and connotations of the term, especially as to how you individually perceive the term.
Your only detailed reference is to the work of Shulamith Firestone without naming the work and focusing only on one aspect of it, namely the criticism of traditional family structures. It seems that you use only that work (you mention Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan in passing, but do not discuss whether you like or do not like what they say in their books. So, since you never defines your term (nor did you define Critical Race Theory when you got to it) , you leave it to the reader’s own prejudices to define. That is not good. (And then to cite the New York Post of all the possible sources you could have found!?!?!?)
You say that you admire the Greek classics. Socrates would have stopped you at the start and made you say what you thought you were talking about. For someone teaching writing, this is a poor exhibition.
The hard left that dominates American institutions will not cede power voluntarily. The reforms sought by the author will not occur without the force of law. The only place reforms have a chance of taking root is in Red states. Red state legislatures must enact laws that make it illegal to discriminate against conservatives, republicans, traditional liberals, and the like in matters of employment, particularly in government, education, and media. Such laws should allow conservative et al. to file lawsuits to obtain equal and proportionate employment in government, education, media, and other institutions. Legal remedies for discrimination against conservatives should include explicit programs, goals, set asides, and time tables for hiring conservatives, as swell as triple monetary damages for individuals and classes of persons harmed by discrimination against conservatives. There is no other way for openly avowed conservatives to obtain meaningful employment in American institutions, especially leadership positions.
No one, so far, has advocated for the easiest fix-end federally subsidized student loans!
As a corollary to this you need to remove the requirement for a four-year college degree from so many places it’s not appropriate for. Pushing kids into universities for no good reason needs to end. Just cutting off the Federal money won’t help unless there’s a corresponding adjustment in other areas. And that’s something I don’t see happening easily because too may people are vested in keeping the degree mills churning along.
I mentioned the reasons behind this in a comment above.
Though the article is an excellent critique of academia (and I completely agree,) it has a blind spot for the dangers of Trumpian conservatism. The shame is that the two current dominant ideologies in the the United States share a love of authoritarian/totalitarian social and political control. Both ideologies share a strong hatred of reality because if interferes with their ability to explain the world rhetorically.
For the next couple of weeks the biggest danger is an attempted coup – something that some of my pro-Trump relatives would completely support and all would ultimately accept. After the new president is sworn in, we will need to turn around and do battle with the woke side. Fighting a two-front war is exhausting, but really the only way to defend liberal democracy. There is no other choice.
You assume the coup hasn’t already been tried against Trump, and the massive fraud in the elections being just the last among many attempts. Not surprising that most are unaware, since major news and social media continue to censor and suppress the evidence. With any luck, the truth will be out soon, but the hate/TDS is so strong that many will refuse to acknowledge it.
Burn. It. Down.
This, I think, is the only solution. The woke fascista have assumed control of the corporations, academia, government, churches and the rest to a degree no one has recognized. Once a building has been infested to this point, even tearing out the walls and fumigating the shell will not rid the structure of the damage.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/6213e4fa-cf03-4dac-97dd-ea17ae846035
…and the movement to bulldoze every college and university continues to grow.
There is another path to de-skewing the indoctrination which is for the majority of college bound students to concentrate on Mathematics, Engineering (all fields), Chemistry and Bio-chemistry (though this latter seems fraught with new age pablum).
Engineering (I eschew the word “science”) forces one to use logic, consider alternative solutions and in general teaches one how to think rationally. All of these features are anathema to the woke socialist indoctrinated.
Yes, I am a retired engineer and even in 1970 the wave of social(ist) justice was under way, only it could not penetrate into the technical fields. I still think this holds true but we see evidence of fewer Americans entering the so called hard “sciences”, meaning they are being swayed into the SJ side of the scales. Even the medical field seems to be affected, this my observation by how the younger doctors now behave with patients and intrusiveness into areas that are not their concern.
By all means, defund the institutions, it does get their attention so long as they are private institutions. Government funded are a whole other matter given the political class is now fully indoctrinated and self serving in pursuit of both money and power.
Skilled trades are another path to a good standard of living, but that requires that we as a nation control the borders to stem the inflow of low skill workers that flood the trades and depress wages. Another whole subject for discussion since here again, political power goes against the interest of the American people.
Leftism / leftoxenomorphism / wokeism / progressivism / feminazism / cultural-marxism / communism / neo-nazism / bullsh!tsectionality / all forms of collectivism are faith based and deeply religious.
American academia is just a collection of Maarx Moloch churches engaged in perpetual orgies of collectivist mysticism.
A simple look at history would illustrate anybody interested in reality that the way of thinking that led to the soviet union, nazi germany, communist china, the killing fields of cambodia, communist cuba and the list goes on is not good for humans. Plain and simple.
There’s nothing in the ruin and suffering and genocide of every single iteration of collectivism in human history that a basically normal and decent human being would go “oyh . . . gotta get me a piece of that!! . . . that looks goooooood!!” and quite to the contrary.
One guesses it takes what currently passes for an institution of learning to do such a poor, nasty and evil job of destroying the minds of the young in this way.
“’Abandon hope all ye who enter here” has been adopted by current American academia as “’abandon all notion of an objective reality all ye who enter here” and most do, gladly.
This is the triumph of the Frankfurt School and several others.
It takes an academic to spouse all that nonsense.
America is being destroyed by collectivism.
We need a final solution to the collectivist problem.
Or America is doomed.
I agree. Feminism is a “harmful to women” concept that is fundamentally flawed from the time of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor. The assumption is that fathers, husbands, and sons do not like or love or respect or think less of mothers, daughters and sisters. This is fundamentally false. It came from a time when discretionary income was scarce so that if you had to choose between educating a son or daughter, you chose the son to provide income to the family. Women were protected. When I started college in 1964, only 15% of high school graduates went to college. Today women have opportunities similar to men. The destructive power of feminism is shown in the declining marriage rates and the declining number of children. I am over 70. The “old” people talk about their children, grand children, health, sports they play (tennis, pickle ball, golf, etc.), investments/finances, bridge, politics, other sports, etc. What they do not talk about is what they did for forty years to earn a living.
Liberals in America are hate-mongering, racist, utterly delusional, morally depraved animals.
No, many Awoken ones may be those things, but (Enlightenment) liberals are starting to speak up, against the Awokens’ pushing of those those things.
The Philosophes (and their heirs) were conscientious thinkers, while these Awokens are nihilistic sociopaths.
Read a recent essay “Suicide of the Liberals” in the October issue of First Things (I think; maybe September) by Gary Saul Morson. Then go out and find a copy of James Burnham’s 1964 classic Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism. Liberals, a dying breed of whites, may not be the same as communists (a psychological division of which the Woke are), but they were never able to resist them. Liberals and commies/Marxists/wokesters etc share too much of the same psychology and thus outlooks to be able to resist the latter with any efficacy. Read my comments above. I explain what’s really going on: wokesterism is an ideological assault waged by an evil alliance of communists and nonwhite racists against Traditional (read: White, Christian, bourgeois, capitalist, libertarian) America. Understand yet? This is total war – genomic war (ie, war between people with absolutely incompatible worldviews borne of radically different neuro-genetic configurations). There will never be compromise; there will never be peace. One side believes in white preservation, the historic family, liberty, the rule of law, and peace and prosperity. The other side is composed of Orwellian totalitarian sadists and simple, envious nonwhite hatemongers (including many Christophobic Jews). Antifa (which has been demonstrated to be disproportionately Jewish) + BLM – the perfect alliance of anti-Americanism. WAKE UP!
I can recommend reading A Book too dangerous to Publish Freedom of Speech and Universities by James R Flynn. Jim was of the Left but believed vehemently in Enlightenment values – reason, evidence, and politeness in discourse. I was fortunate enough to study under him, and he passed away recently, but as someone who suffered oppression for opposing racism, he provides important arguments against cancel culture.
lol, nice ideas and recommendations. This analysis and solutions has been kicked around since the 90’s. Its a little too late. The Woke have marched from the institutions, to the corporations, to now, governments in the U.S. They are infused into all positions of power. There is only 2 ways power has ever been transferred. The first is voluntarily and the second is you have to take it. Which do you think the Woke are going to choose?
But how did they get so much power? Because of white liberals. But how did white liberals get so much power? Because of racial diversity. What caused racial diversity? 1) The civil rights movement to totalitarian racial integration + 2) the welfare state’s massively increasing minority birthrates, while concurrently depressing the natality of the white taxpayers forced to pay for it + 3) above all, the totally unrequested and unwanted post-1965 Third World Immigration Invasion of Democratic party bloc-voters (see “California Politics 1960-2020”). Stupid whites were too cowardly to stand up to the Cheap Labor Lobby constantly agitating for more Third World peons “to do the jobs Americans won’t do”, and the Christian churches utterly infected with Satanic racial self-flagellationism (in addition to pedophilia, of course).
Now? The only answer is white racial nationalism. We need a White Politics to stand up for White Americans. Stop pretending their is any other solution. Power can only be met with countervailing power.
You are spot on in your comments.
Whew, a lot to dig through. But one question, if you countervail power with power, when does it stop? You get a gun, they get a canon. You bring heavy artillery, they respond with tanks. You bring out anti-tank weaponry, they carpet bomb you. You take out sarin gas, they bring nukes. You dig out your hydrogen bombs, and we all go to oblivion.
They say Plato said ‘Only the dead have seen the end of the war’. I never encountered that in all of Plato I read, but I know Kant said that the perpetual peace can be strived for in the world, but it can also be found on cemeteries.
So, let me offer a different proposal. First, maybe we start with a different hypothesis. The woke didn’t get power from white liberals, and white liberals didn’t get power from racial diversity, which wasn’t caused by movement to ‘totalitarian’ integration. There were white liberals before and independent of racial diversity (Hobbes, Locke, etc.) and racial diversity existed before the Civil Rights movement. What is racial diversity? The presence of different racial groups on the same territory. When did it start?
It started with the first settlement in America. There were non-whites before whites. Then the vast majority of non-whites died because of diseases inadvertently spread across the continent. Then whites settled but lacked proper workforce. That is how slavery started. Now you have three racial groups, indigent, white and black. There is your diversity. Totalitarian integration? I thought integration started with the words ‘All men are created equal’. Nothing totalitarian about it, but took time to hold.
No the problem is something else. Those with money have power. What power? Spending power. This is the most important feature. Kids rile against a brand on Twitter, the brand will do whatever they want out of the fear they will avoid it. If the conservative kids had the same spending power, they would have louder voices across the board.
Now look at demographics. Compare the liberal/conservative divide and cross-reference it with income. You’ll see that liberals are concentrated in richer, more densely populated areas than conservatives. That is far more powerful distinction than race, sex, gender, or anything else. Class divides are the issue, and have always been, though not in the way Marx or Marxists would understand. It is not about class struggle, fighting between entire groups, but about enabling class permeability. In short, when young conservatives become richer, their voices will be more easily heard.
My two cents. I don’t have ready answers to complex questions, nor would I designate myself squarely into any of the ideological tribes (because no one can be right all the time), but the above are some of the factors that are less prominent in the discussions I read.
I’m not attempting to get in the middle of the statistical aspects of various arguments however, I find myself surprised by the comments to this post.
I’m confused by the level of hostility toward a person who was once affirmatively a CSJ / CRT / etc. proponent who seems to have realized that what she/he [gotta love anonymity ;-)] once believed is a load of horsehockey and then found the wherewithal not only to begin changing their mind but took the further step of submitting a post about it to this site.
Is this not a win for the very logic this site claims to promote?
Regardless of any flaws in various statements or data points (that should be adressed), isn’t the point of this site to help educate and inform “the woke”, such that they “see the light” – or – is this site just another echo chamber for the diehards to flame a recent convert that appears to making an effort to change – albeit not up to some folks standards?
How else should one learn?
I find that making mistakes can be a good instructor although not always the most pleasant.
Obviously, I have no idea about the IRL person behind this article but for a moment let’s give the benefit of the doubt and assume the person behind the article is in fact, genuine.
Is this post – along with its flaws – not exactly what this site is trying to accomplish?
I can only hope that more people begin to come to the same realization this person has come to and begin to work to unravel the lies of the insidious CT pedagogy.
Perhaps it would be more helpful to encourage the author by pointing out errors and providing useful guidance rather than berating them for not having a perfectly formed piece on the first try?
I’m not suggesting that folks shouldn’t perform due diligence – only that this seems like a huge win for this site.
However, the general response has been to beat the author with the crudgel of – not statistically laden enough – or whatever folks are getting bent out of shape over.
dac-
Agree. Failure, not success, is the better teacher. Further agree that the author’s recantations are an example of a success in the battle against critical theory ideas.
This article is so ridiculously, and transparently, fake.
Try to write an article as the author wrote.
I enjoyed the article a lot. I suppose I had a similar arc, but went further. I started out in academia completely immersed in surrealism, Marxism, anarchism, and came across postmodern and poststructuralist theory, but came to realize that many of the professors and students were humorless goons who just wanted to kill everybody. I survived. I got a job. I try to write for journals that study humor (they’ve even ruined these), and journals that study Christian thought (they’ve even ruined these), as well as write a conservative column for the local paper (they wouldn’t allow me to challenge the most recent election), and I have supported President Trump openly. However, I also am very interested in environmental conservation, as well as human rights worldwide. I can’t even imagine how much more difficult it would be inside a women’s studies department. The best thing is to head for a college that is somewhat rural, where a few other conservatives manage to remain on the faculty. Laugh a lot, but not too much. I tried to start a blog, but got death threats on my children. So, that’s out. This was a neat article, and I hope the author will survive.
Once Biden makes college free, the money will dry up and colleges will lose their power to drive society towards its destruction.
Great article. The only thing I would add is students’ complicity in this. The democratization of college education has led to an influx of students with no desire to learn anything, it’s just that everyone goes to college. Social justice theory is a godsend to these students since it replaces academic rigor with the much easier process of learning a few slogans and regurgitating them to your professors. Everyone is happy but very little educating occurs.
Having spent three decades in women’s studies (now women’s, gender, and sexuality studies) I agree with the author that there is an expectation to adopt a certain politics. I’d go further to say this politics is expected to be IN your research and teaching–which only, ultimately, undermines the authority any academic will have, be they in gender studies or geology. In my view, however, de-funding higher ed is NOT a wise solution. If we had more well trained, tenure-line faculty with terminal degrees and the job security that enables them to be free thinking, we’d have fewer people who are too scared or too uncritical to challenge whatever theory is in vogue. I do not agree with the author that conservative groups need to get involved. How about getting politics OUT of higher ed for a change?!
A very important point. A trend along with the woke-ification of academia has been the adjunctification. Modern universities are now corporate enterprises selling a “lifestyle,” and only very secondarily are interested in teaching students. Roughly 70% of classes are now taught by adjuncts by one metric. Of course this is utterly exploitative, and people with PhDs are paid pennies to teach a high course load– probably significantly less than minimum wage by the time grading is added in– and the author was quite right to point out the hypocrisy of these “socially just” universities being so ruthlessly exploitative. But, just as importantly, adjuncts do not have the standing to air anything that would be taken as controversial. If anything, the desperation for a tenure position leaves academics willing to use anything at their disposal, including leveraging their “identity” in any way possible
David
Did you complete an exhaustive literature review?
Seriously, did you ever study research methodology and stats? Also, do you know what a meta-analysis is?
Cal, what about the burden of proof do you not understand?
Name dropping basic stat principles you can’t begin to make sense of nor apply in your argument doesn’t prove millenials hate America, I’m sorry old man.
Cal thinks a “meta-analysis” of general surveys about how all Americans view congress is proof millenials are woke and think America is evil apparently.
Despite the fact that 70 percent of millenials consider themselves to be very patriotic with only 11% saying it’s not the best country in the world
Ok Cal, when you’re done obsessing about what teenagers are tweeting you may opt to learn a little something about the long list of genocide and torture committed by Christians for 1700+ years
“the long list of genocide and torture committed by Christians for 1700+ years”.
Which pertains to *what* in this post/ thread?
What if it is a Freudian slip, pertaining only to whatever axe you’re in the mood to grind?
“*obsessing* about what teenagers are tweeting”?
*If* so much of what teenagers are tweeting is sociopathic, maybe we should “obsess” about it.
David-
Science never proves….anything! It merely rejects or accepts a hypothesis!
The Holocaust and the Gulag were both the products of decidedly secular regimes.
I disagree with the author’s advice to pull their children from public schools, as this is not an option for many working parents. A better option is to fight this at the level of the local school board. Do not allow advocates of CRT and related woke nonsense to get elected to the school boards. Run for school board positions yourselves if you must to keep these zealots out of positions whereby they can inflict their ideology on students via the curriculum. Keep a close eye on what your children are being taught. This garbage is just as dangerous as creationism and should not be tolerated.
“I decided to seek out and try to understand other points of view, so I read books by authors to whom I had never been exposed, such as F.A. Hayek, Ronald Bork, Jonathan Haidt, Thomas Sowell, and others. I began to read and listen to conservative, classically liberal, and libertarian thinkers—people whose ideas I had never encountered in all my years of so-called “higher” education. ”
I don’t understand. Most people do that in high school. Did you really get that far in life before expanding your intellectual horizons? Were you that enamored with education that you just picked up and accepted whatever they happen to be putting down? I know no one who does that in real life.
“Most people do that in high school.”
Risible rubbish.
In your article, you said “the majority of millenials are heavily woke” and that the “woke think America is evil” which of course, is an insane deduction. Show me the surveys, show me the data. Oh wait, the data suggests the exact opposite. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/07/03/a-generational-gap-in-american-patriotism/
^^Only 11% of millenials polled say America is not the greatest country in the world. (70%) agreed with the statement “I am very patriotic.” You’re a clown. That is why universities don’t want to hire you.
Millennials actually have the highest levels of trust and lowest levels of anger towards the American government. https://www.npr.org/2011/11/03/141984787/generation-gap-how-age-shapes-political-outlook
You also spoke about the virtue of treating people as individuals while parroting every stereotype of the left ever. You then railed about “silicon valley censorship” while posting on a forum that only allows comments in its comment board that are “approve by moderators’
I mean your article is so bad it’s tempting to read as satire.
The author of the article says “the majority of Millennials and Generation Z are heavily woke [today].”
You present an old statistic from 2013 saying the Millennials are woke in a special sense (attitude towards patriotism), and an even older statistic from 2011 on ideological preferences and electoral preferences – so what’s you point?
The burden of proof is on the author making the claim that millennials think America is evil. If you have more recent data to suggest a majority of millennials went from being proud of America to thinking it was evil then post it. Otherwise shut up
” I grew exhausted by feeling constant anger.” I love this line from the author. David are you feeling a little exhausted?
David apparently has a bad day.
👌
I don’t believe there is a point aside from “I don’t agree with you, so you’re a moron and I picked this data to prove it.”
Those comments do point out one of the fallacies with data: you can find just about any kind of data you want to support your point. The context of that data doesn’t matter, so long as there’s a link to it. Data also often fails to examine the why. Context matters, but sadly most these days don’t seem to understand it. Especially when they’re blinded with a graph.
Arguments without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Stop listening to your gut and try to actually substantiate your ideas.
The context of my data was spot on.
GenXer has little use for data when he absorbs the objective truth straight from his gut.
Data can absolutely be weaponized and it’s pretty easy. We humans are hardwired to ‘make sense’ of our world so we, almost immediately, assign causes to the effects we see. So a data warrior (yes, I just made up this term) simply has to provide the effect and the recipient will fill in the context and cause. And when the data warrior has already set up a context (usually totally unrelated) that is fresh in the recipient’s mind, the recipient will automatically connect that context to the new information and believe they have discovered the truth for themselves.
For example;
Context:
– humans have poor night vision compared to cats
Statistic:
– over 80% of car accidents occur at night
Both statements can be independently true but what you’ve done is nearly immediately tried to connect the two and assign ‘poor night vision’ as the cause for ‘high accident rate at night’. I chose a context for a certain outcome but I could have picked any context that would lead to any type of association. How about “most spousal arguments occur after dinner”. Now i’m picturing people driving recklessly at night because they just got in a fight with their spouse.
Of course the more easily verifiable and personally relatable each statement is, the more quickly we connect them and buy-in to the implied relationship between them. And though this causal relationship may be only a figment of our imagination, we will treat it as some great truth that we’ve uncovered because we made the connection ourselves. We do this naturally. (See Daniel Kahneman for in-depth info on this topic)
All the data warrior has to do is set up a context of their choosing and then provide catalytic data and we do the rest. CRT has defined systemic racism on a completely misunderstood statistic, namely disparity in participation rates between racial groups. Of course they discard any contextual examination outside of the one they supply and quickly point to ‘lived experience’, thus having their cake and eating it too.
PS data is weaponized this way in every corner of media and politics, not just CRT and BLM.
PPS I made up the statistic for the example
“Science”! (hush, hush, genuflect). When I was a teen, it told me we’d freeze, run out of oxygen, run out of oil, and run out of fossil fuels by 1985. I got older, it told me we’d bake.
Actually, I’m all for careful observation and rigorous methodology in looking at physical phenomena. I’ve given the researchers the benefit of the doubt in figuring out the COVID-19 epidemic and the best response., angering my anti-mask friends in the process (typically, they’re wondering if spiking suicide, substance abuse, and mental illness rates aren’t a cure worse than the disease; not “anti-science”).
But, perhaps, couldn’t someone stop and consider, along with Michael Polanyi, that science is tentative?
I’ve also wondered, there must be loads of academic and tech victims of Wokeness to build both a few new net platforms and a new university.
If my data is outdated then prove me wrong with your damning updated surveys proving a majority of millenials think America is evil.
The burden of proof rests on the side of the accusation after all….logic 101
David,
Every generation has been subjected to stereotypes, deserved or not, from previous generations. My own generation (Gen X) received it’s name from a book written by a Boomer that said we were all “slackers”. It was total bs, but that did not stop the author from finding an audience with thousands of gullible people, who were easily persuaded to part with their money. I’m pretty sure if you went back as a fly in Abraham’s tent you would have heard him lament to Sarah at some point about the younger generation – something along the lines of “these darned kids these days….”. It’s been going on forever and before long Millennials will try to tag Gen Z or whatever generation comes after them with some questionable stereotypes of their own.
Get over it and get on with life. Be productive, build something, start a family, whatever. In short get on with life before you get too far and realize the sum total of your self-worth is measured in the number of posts or responses or likes you got.
Life is way too short, and sooner or later we all come to that realization. To paraphrase the wisest man I know in academia, the highly esteemed Dean Wormer of Faber College, “Angry, bitter, and self-righteous is no way to go through life, son.”
That’s what happens when education K-university level is woke brainwashing
David-
Try searching info on trust in government with these words : 70% americans don’t trust congress.
I don’t know how familiar you are with polling practices and what constitutes a representative sample. Suffice it to say, it is necessary to look at methodology before deciding whether or not the numbers are reliable.
However, if one were to do a meta-analysis, I suspect one would find decreasing levels of trust in government.
Have you ever studied research methodology and stats? Also, it is generally not a good idea to use citations that are older than five years.
Cal, what are you even arguing? The burden of proof isn’t on me to begin with. I’m not the one placing outlandish stereotypes and accusations on tens of millions of people.
The best evidence your side has that the majority of millenials think America is evil is your suggestion to Google Americans distrust of congress?
“Otherwise shut up”.
That this “Dave” goes there is likely a Tell on the mentality of the Woke crowd.
He has no more *authority* to tell others to shut up, than do the (other?) Millennials who so often style themselves to have such authority.
Ms. “Jones'”, reference to “the majority of Millennials and Generation Z are heavily woke”, was a *brief* aside, in a paragraph about
“people committed to liberal values have many significant disadvantages in this fight. They are generally older….”
This “Dave” has hijacked this thread into a pedantic dustup, over her not bothering to give data on an utterly minor point.
I urge you other folk, e.g. ntim, GenXer, John, & Cal, to ignore such trolling.
Her larger drift was about e.g.
“the woke view these Enlightenment values as a white supremacist project; wokeness advances primarily through underhanded tactics:….”
I’d hope that this thread does more justice, to such issues as these underhanded tactics (e.g. straw men).
Concur. David needs help.
Millennials trusting the government is not particularly shocking. They are being indoctrinated to view government in the same way religious people view God, as our savior.
As far as 70% of Millennials identifying as patriotic in that particular survey, that was the lowest percentage of the demographics listed. The fact that it was 70% shows things have not not yet deteriorated beyond repair.
An excellent comment, well reasoned and powerful.
Claiming that millenials hate America is bigotry, yet the article’s author claims to be an advocate of tolerance and intelligent liberal debate.
Maybe the evil woke mind controllers made her write this trash, in an effort to make critics of identity politics look bad.
David – with respect, a LOT has changed since 2013 and 2011, specifically with regards to the topic at hand.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-have-shifted-dramatically-on-what-values-matter-most-11566738001 Look at the poll numbers as to patriotism and marriage
It’s a very well considered and beautifully written article – thankyou.
From my perspective the one thing I really can’t live with about woke protagonists is the way that they try to break down the family unit as they seek to wrest the hearts and minds of their charges away from their parents. It’s a war on love.
This website features authors railing against “silicon valley” censorship yet makes all comments seek their approval before being posted like wow that is some serious goddamn irony.
Bravo!
Is Ted Kaczynski writing about how feminists are destined to destory America (from prison) again?
As of March 2015, only 109 out of 577 public four-year universities across the country considered race in admissions. I can’t imagine why she left that little factoid out.
California just voted overwhelmingly to keep it illegal, as it has been since 96.
Author rails against how the woke groups/stereotypes and demonizes people instead of criticizing the individual’s ideas while spending her entire rant going on wild stereotypes about millenials to nowhere with no supporting evidence or data. Too many professors vote democrat? Yeah, largely because liberals are statistically far more likely to pursue academia and phds. Now you’re the dumbass calling for equal outcomes.
I could spend a year picking every goddamn unsound line apart it’s so hypocritically asinine. I can’t imagine why she posted anonymously as opposed to publicly debating her colleagues.
Getting serious fake author vibes or something of the sort. Prove me wrong, OP
Agree. I doubt this person exists as presented. The writing is good but reads like a conservative fantasy – like a wistful recently retired White male university professor that just barely got away with his life. If the author was was real I don’t see how they could continue work as a Women’s Studies professor. The self-loathing, loss of self-respect, and daily contradictions would be too great to continue work in Woke academia.
Actually the writing is poor. She (or whoever it is) does not define, or in anyway explain, what she means by Critical Social Justice or Critical Race Theory. And she is supposed to teach writing????? On top of that, her only concrete criticism is of an extreme claim not by de Beauvoir or Friedan but by a lesser light named Firestone. But she uses that one extreme claim to attack the whole of the programme, again without bothering to define it at all. She leaves it to the reader’s own prejudices.
This is a scare piece written for the sole purpose of reinforcing social conservative objections to change and equality before the law.
Bunk. There hasn’t been legal segregation in this country for decades. Further, in this country, conservatism is keeping equality before the law unchanged.
The “Woke” are going to drive us into a position in which their own smaller and smaller elite cannibalizes itself in useless struggles for power whose goal will be to find more and more “spies and wreckers” of their “scientifically-based” social experiment. Think the Kims of Pyongyang killing even themselves for the sake of power. This will go on while all the rest of society are both cowed and utterly impoverished.
I’ve met Democratic Kampuchea.
Anyone who is familiar with either deBeavoir’s views on motherhood and Friedan’s views on the conventional family understands that both are part of the pantheon of classical feminist ideology. Change and equality do not and should not include barring women from enjoying bearing and raising children as their primary goal in life or a view that the conventional normal family is a comfortable concentration camp
I have no doubt this person exists. I’ve met people like this in academia. They tend to be a very silent large minority at least. Tenure is a powerful tool to manipulate many into submission.
They just don’t believe in the product they are selling but the pay and lack of competition for their jobs are too much to muster the will to speak out against the intolerant.
‘As of March 2015, only 109 out of 577 public four-year universities across the country considered race in admissions. I can’t imagine why she left that little factoid out.’
Citation please. I suspect you are citing only PFYUs with ‘official ‘Affirmative Action policies. However, there are many MANY ways of selecting for race/sex/ethnicity in admissions without outright making it a public policy. Weighted SAT scores, for one. Selecting for students coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, or from economically depressed neighborhoods. The list is endless. When there’s a will, the equal-outcomes crowd will find a way, even if hurts the marginalized being thrown into a education climate they are ill-suited to thanks to the shitty primary and secondary schooling they received prior to uni.
‘Author rails against how the woke groups/stereotypes and demonizes people instead of criticizing the individual’s ideas while spending her entire rant going on wild stereotypes about millennials to nowhere with no supporting evidence or data.’
If you think cancel culture doesn’t exist you’re either for it or willfully blind to it. If you need citations to prove the Woke ideological stew isn’t nuts evidence isn’t going to convince you. I agree that stereotyping an entire generation is wrong, but a lot of it is because dissenters have learned to STFU, thus that generation appears to speak with mostly one voice, that espousing Leftist White Supremacism.
‘I could spend a year picking every goddamn unsound line apart it’s so hypocritically asinine. I can’t imagine why she posted anonymously as opposed to publicly debating her colleagues.’
Then spend a few minutes picking apart a couple and post your arguments demolishing them here for discussion. As for posting anonymously, let’s see you post something in your own name that is against the narrative of the crowd you seem to run with, and see what happens. My prediction is they’d rip you to shreds and trample on the bloody pieces while howling in righteous glee. Not something that will happen here.
‘This website features authors railing against “silicon valley” censorship yet makes all comments seek their approval before being posted like wow that is some serious goddamn irony.’
Maybe it’s your browser. Or maybe is the vitriol, insulting language, and ad-hominem attacks that are flagging moderation (which isn’t censorship much less outright banning). My posts come up promptly.
“spending her *entire* rant going on wild stereotypes about millennials”.
Not in the essay I just read, in which she makes *one* reference to millennials as a group: “the *majority* of Millennials and Generation Z are heavily woke.”
By my lights, that is not a case of “wild stereotypes”.
The Woke aren’t worth talking to, much because they can’t help but straw-manning their critics.
It is indeed grotesque, that they’ve managed to bulldoze their way into polite society.
Until they get their acts together in such regards (e.g. constant straw-manning), they should be barred from polite society.
Let them stay in their echo-chambers, where they can occupy each other with their bile about the White Patriarchy etc.
Total garbage comment from a typically woke ahole. I knew in 1982 that I would have no future in academia, despite having many profs at my Ivy U who wanted me to go the PhD route, and a nearly perfect GRE verbal score (and high Math and especially what then was called “Logical Reasoning” scores, too, but my interest was in the humanities). My point being that universities are rabidly leftist in no small part because rightists have been systematically excluded from the professoriat literally for nearly a century. Read the bio of Ludwig von Mises, whom many of us regard as the greatest economist of the 20th century. Even in the immediate aftermath of WW2, he could not get a (paid) job in US academia due to his staunch anti-socialism. How many Biblical literalists teach in secular American universities? There are tens of thousands of OPEN COMMUNISTS teaching; is there a single neo-Nazi, you know, for the sake of {intellectual} ‘diversity’ (the one type of diversity noticeably and sorely absent from American academia)? How many white nationalists have university jobs? Paleoconservatives? Mere (pathetic) Republicans?
Biblical literalism is completely at odds with science, education and logical thinking.
Calm down . You are dangerously unhinged.
I suggest that you are hypoctiticallly assinine in your very deluded response.
That you believe tht only 109 out of 577 use race in admissions goes against the vast majority of literature and studies on this subject.
The article is right on and you are very off……part of the problem and no part of any solution, EVER!
Thank you for saying this so that I don’t have to. I got bored with the article in the end–it reads like a polemic created by a think tank. It uses buzzwords and plays to pre-existing perceptions and fears held by some members of the American public. I oppose this stuff for the same reason I oppose wokism–because I don’t like being manipulated and played. And I get this sense that this article is trying to do just that. I’m willing to be proven wrong, but it doesn’t sit right with me.
Hi Samantha. Had you started out with “I’m sorry, I screwed up. I embraced something downright dangerous, something that captivated me not because of the strength of its ideas, but because it has succeeded in silencing more reasonable and time-tested principles,” then your entire article would be far more powerful. The most powerful thing we do in life is learn, and laying our mistakes bare is one of the best ways both to make the lesson stick and also to pass it along.
As I have said on earlier comments to other articles on this site, Wokeism is White Supremacy, because it traces its roots to Leftist Whites and their allies, it was espoused and promulgated by Leftist Whites and their allies, and it is being implemented by Leftist Whites and their allies. Who stand outside the Intersectionality pyramid they created for others because they are the priesthood of the Revealed ‘Truth’ and so should not be held accountable for their own Unearned Privilege.
Perhaps we should call what they plan to impose on us for what it is: Woke Crow. It is as racist, bigoted, and sexist an ‘ideology’ as has ever existed. Everyone is to be assigned to their ‘proper’ (in their unquestionably unassailable opinions) demographic /ideological corrals (one and the same to them), and those sheep who balk at being herded into the pens will be very publicly culled to cow the rest into fearful compliance. And of course the thoughts, beliefs, and actions of each intersectional herd will all dictated by and enforced by the Leftist White Supremacists and their willing allies, panting and eager to gain fortune and power while proving and improving their Woke cred.
Turn their arguments against them. Since they deny objective truth and reason, deny them the right to impose ‘their’ truth and objectives on you or anyone. Constantly call them what they are; deluded tools for Leftist White Supremacism. If they object to that moniker tell them that they are obviously displaying False Consciousness or Race/Sex/Ethno/Orientation traitors. Be as angry and vicious as they are in defending what you hold near and dear. Do not apologize, do not back down. Ever.
And to those who claim that by using their own tactics against them you are becoming just as bad as them, you’re wrong. You are civilized; you know how to act civilized to others who are, and you will continue to do so before, between, and after battles. Your opponents are barbarians trying to overthrow civilization; they don’t know how to act civilized because they never learned to.
Why do I think I’m right about this? Because of the example of the past. Think about how many millions of combat vets just in this country who over the centuries returned home from fighting and killing, sometimes even their own countrymen. Did they en masse continue to act as savagely as they had on the battlefield? The vast majority did not. Because they’d been ‘civilized’ before going to war. They came home from the battles they fought in, resumed life as best they could, and for the most lived and died civilized men.
Tars-
I agree. The woke notion that truth doesn’t exist is actually a statement of truth. It is a non sequitur! In other words, it. makes. no sense!
I saw this idea embodied in the 1990s by American Psychological Association (APA). The APA communicated to all members that they could not judge others because that was intolerant and it is bad (a judgment) to be intolerant which is….bad.
By the way, I recognize the deleterious affects psychology and other social sciences has and can have on society and the individual.
On another note, the current incarnation of CT ideology is fundamentally no different from the early 1900s progressivism which is basically no different in practice from puritanism from the 1500s/early 1600s which is about the same as….
Here’s a fun H. L. Mencken quote: “Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Which is no different than the sophist movement in Ancient Greece. They the denied the existence of objective truth and incited Socrates and Plato to formulate the most objectivist of any objective ontology ever devised – the theory of Forms.
Nothing new under the Sun, indeed.
Borg-
Thanks for seeing my point.
Your second sentence there gives me some hope for the future. We just need our serious thinkers to not get completely run out of town.
This explains why global corporations are now the conveyance for Marxusm.
“Woke Crow” is a genius meme that should be propagated.
Move over Jim, the Woke Crow laws are coming at the behest of the Cult of Woke!
I also considered Jim Woke.
“I realized that Critical Social Justice ideology is not only intellectually vacuous; it is downright dangerous, and that the reason it has captivated so many minds is not because of the strength of its ideas, but because it has succeeded in silencing more reasonable and time-tested principles.”
Small correction…”I realized that Critical Social Justice ideology is not only intellectually vacuous; it is WRONG, and that the reason it has captivated so many minds is not because of the strength of its ideas, but because it has succeeded in silencing more reasonable and time-tested principles.”
Those challenging Critical Theory and its fellow travellers need to attack it on the grounds that it is wrong, false, illogical, irrational, self-contradictory – and that it relies on people allowing it to get away with using, even if implicitly, the very concepts it attacks to gain currency. If many students are looking for secular truth and fewer are religious, then Critical Theory must be attacked on those grounds. It should be identified as essentially a faith and that its arguemnts rest on the same sort of assumptions as do organized religion. It must be denied intellectual legitimacy.
In so far as its appeal goes, apart from – in the case of many students – a desire to stand for justice and truth (!) in an uncompromising way, the basic appeal is that of power. If reason, logic, objectivity and truth can be set aside, being a “scholar” is a lot easier. And if everything is about power, one can rationalize one’s envy, hatred, and powerlust a lot more easily. Fundamentally, the people leading this movement are impotent and unaccomplished in any real sense: their only sense of efficacy comes from smashing things. Recognizing this will go a long way towards defeating them.
Here’s a thought: if Critical Social Justice feeds on the impotent resentment you allude to, could it be that no end of reasoned argument can ever take it down? Why are these young people so resentful?
An element of it is honor-culture by proxy, which was likely the result of our attempts to stop school bullying, post-Columbine. We told kids that if anything ever upsets them, notify an adult who will go handle the problem children. The children who were taught that went to college thinking that’s how the adult world works.
Then they take up critical race theories and wokeness, and bizarrely think that power flows from being a loser from a long line of losers. Well, just point out that they are losers, and that even though your ancestors may have exploited and abused their worthless ancestors to get to the top of the status hierarchy, if you were to abandon your exalted position as a winner then all of their ancestors’ suffering will have been for nothing.
Humiliate them in the harshest possible terms, and perhaps they’ll quit glorying in being losers.
@George Turner:
No, bullying is counter productive: The problem is not that we identified bullying as unhealthy and a problem. That is not the cause of wokism.
The problem is that we let woke akctivists bully people.
Bullying people that bought into victimhood culture is counter productive by the way. It will not help them heal but intensify the resentment and victimhood mentality.
And that is not just true when it comes to progressive activist and minority activist that got conditioned with critical theory. It is true in general. How did it work out to bully (alleged) Trump suporters or bully people for not opposing him enough?
In 2016 that got Trump elelcted and it almost got him reelected in 2020 if it had not been for the following combinations of facts:
a) COVID happened and the Trump administration did not perform its best (to put it mildly),
b) the woke surge and push back after Floid’s death
c) as a consequence of point a) the cancelletion of the 2020 Olympic Games (because it would have been the first Olympic Games with trans-women allowed to participate in the female competitions, thereby rubbing the absurdity of it under the nose of every one in a prime time event that can not be ignored by the media while progressive media figures and the presidential candidate of the Democrats would have been forced to defend the absurdity of men winning almost all gold medals originally reserved for women.)
d) the not unimportant fact that Trump himself was and is a bully.
You cannot reason people out of positions they were never reasoned into. Perpetual resentment is an adolescent attitude which is self-serving, allowing you to feel superior to the world. If you have no other legitimate claim to superiority, why would you ever give up your resentment?
It so used to be that smoking was cool. Cool people smoked, so young people smoked to be the part of the tribe. Nowadays, it is anger. Cool people are angry, so…
I think a good question is, can something like Critical Social Justice maintain itself it in the form of a stable orthodoxy? We have to remember that it is, in essence, an ideological opposition. My guess is that its current ‘high boil’ is too unstable, too energy-intensive, too quixotic even, to ever deliver the basis for long-term research programme ‘use’ within academia, in addition to its praxis being built on ideological sand. To put it crudely, it may have nowhere to go and so will fall apart under the weight of its own expectations.
“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” – Serenity Prayer (abbreviated)
Most academics have little or no actual exposure to institutions other than their own (and by that I mean the one they teach at). It’s how the system works. I have no argument with the author for not being 100% aware of these things…it’s not how it works. If all you read is the Chronicle of Higher Education you’re not going to hear about this stuff.
Yeah, I could rip the article if I wanted to, but that feels like a very “Woke” response. Instead, I found it a decent read and it actually had some suggestions instead of a massive wall of philosophical babble most people won’t read anyhow (I know some enjoy that stuff and more power to them, but we’re at the point now where real examples and tangible ideas are needed, not more discourses). I’m not sure where we’d find teachers these days who could implement some of the ideas she presents, but it’s better than handing kids a copy of the 1619 Project and lecturing them about their privilege or whatever before calling it quits for the day.
Another actionable idea might be requiring all these woke crusaders to work each summer for the duration of their time in college on clean-up and betterment projects in the middle of all the people they’re so bent on saving/educating/patronizing (and include poor white neighborhoods as well…diversity and all that). Don’t let them run back to their gated communities or comfy dorms, either; make them stay in the community they’re serving for the duration of their time. There are so many tuition forgiveness programs out there you could just add this to it. Call it the WCC (Woke Cleaning Corps) or something.
GenXer-
I agree. The problem has been identified. As a few of us here have discussed previously, a plan of action to treat/repel CT needs to be outlined and then implemented.
Continued discussion of the same ideas allows people to vent thoughts, but that’s about it. I do understand, however, that not all the readers may be familiar with CT ideology. Nevertheless, it seems a little pointless to harp on how bad everything is and do nothing to fix the problem.
One action I would take is end federally subsidized student loans. No school administrator wants to lose money; and will therefore willingly or otherwise comply with government demands/whims on an issue. Also, subsidized loans are the root cause of expensive tuition. A few other things too, such as going to a school one can’t afford or wasting loan dollars on noneducational expenses.
Also, eliminate “studies” pursuits. What would one do with a degree in woman’s studies? Work for a government bureaucracy? How about a degree in gender studies? Be an “activist”? Somehow, studies degrees (I could be wrong here) don’t seem quite as versatile as a degree in chemistry or physics.
By the way, I’d like to see teachers work in the private sector in a job that isn’t teaching for a while.
I sometimes refer to the private sector as the “grown-up world”.
I tend to blame the credentialist culture that rose after the Boomers went through college as well. They accelerated the problem. Degrees went from being almost optional to essentially mandatory.
Studies degrees are perhaps TOO versatile…you can turn them into whatever you want with no controls whatsoever. Making it up as you go spawned CRT in many ways, and having whole departments dedicated to various ‘studies’ programs just feeds the beast. You could sense it starting in the late ’80s when those things started popping up as minors…but unfortunately the established faculty ignored them as being faddish or just not worth dealing with. And here we are.
Actually I’d like to see teachers (and others…I don’t feel the science types are “above” this kind of thing) work for a couple of years in the service sector so they can deal first-hand with all the entitled idiots out there. Maybe having to scramble for a living would serve as a bit of a reality check for them. When I worked in the university environment there was a clear difference between those who had worked (or continued to do so while in school) and those who never had.
As you say there are many academics now installed in the humanities who literally have never done anything outside of academia. At least a couple of generations ago they may have experienced war or something, now few have even had summer jobs, which I may add are a poor substitute to actually depending on a pay-cheque. One sociology lecturer of mine actually boasted about never having had a job outside of the faculty.
And in the last decade or so, as you allude to, we have had an explosion of ‘studies’ all flexing a form of critical theory in various directions, a kind of scholasticism to my mind, incredibly inward looking and self-indulgent.
The spawning of various “studies” fields is the foundation of the Educational Industrial Complex and woe be to anyone who threatens it. Imagine the enormous amounts of revenue feeding that beast if free college for everyone is ever put into action.
100% agree on this analysis. Abraham Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer who apprenticed (what we used to call internships) under a lawyer for his final training before the bar. Only two states allow people to take a non-law school pathway to becoming a lawyer and passing the bar. All other states require this expensive pathway through law school and then through the bar. You can’t even attend law school if you need to do it virtually; the American Bar Association (ABA) prohibits virtual classes except for a 10% threshold at all ABA accredited law schools.
Abraham Lincoln would be impossible today. Our society could not create him precisely because all the pathways to professionals careers that come with opportunities for voice and change are locked down by a protective older class that sought to close the pathways they took to power. They do this in order to protect that power. This is selfish, evil stuff.
No. It’s time to remove all Federal funding (at least) of higher “education”. It’s also time to bring back IQ tests in employment, the lack of which is the only reason employers prefer college grads (ie, they have been disallowed by Marxistic SCOTUS decisions from administering IQ tests, and thus have to use ‘IQ proxies’, like being a college grad, bonus points for attending an elite school, to estimate a new job-seeker’s innate abilities). The effect of re-legalizing the administration of IQ tests will be a huge drop in college enrollments, and a concomitant collapse of several hundred (maybe over a thousand) colleges/universities (which would be a very good thing from a societal preservationist perspective). After all, why would mostly unintellectual people shell out several hundred thousand dollars (and four years of wasted life) for some worthless degree, when they can save the time and money, and still get the job (if qualified) via a simple IQ test?
Finally, I have been on a 20+ year quest to get everyone I know who went to private universities NOT to make alumni donations. These schools are actively working to eradicate Traditional America. If you are a conservative, or even any kind of patriot, why would you ever donate to your moral/racial/cultural/ideological enemies??? I tell my GOP friends, you don’t give money to Democrats, so why give money to institutions that are creating future Democrats. If Trump and 2020 taught the Bonehead Right and its Stupid Party anything, it’s that we are in a full-spectrum Cold War with a ruthless enemy without honor or ethics. Stacy Abrams, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Ocasio-Cortez, de Blasio, Cuomo, Talib, Warnock/Ossoff, etc, are every bit as much America’s enemies as the Soviets of my youth (actually, I argue the former are more purely leftist than the latter). Dying America needs to start acting accordingly, to begin moving to a total war-footing (as we are truly living in the period “avant la guerre”).
>> Don’t let them run back to their gated communities or comfy dorms, either; make them stay in the community they’re serving for the duration of their time. There are so many tuition forgiveness programs out there you could just add this to it. Call it the WCC (Woke Cleaning Corps) or something.
So much of the wokeness is talk and ruining other people’s lives. It has nothing to do with getting down and dirty working to solve the real problems in society that oppress people. Wokness is setting minorities back, not helping them get up and make their own successes.
👌
I agree that the more exposure people have to others different from themselves, the more educated they will be.
Pedant alert: It was Ayn Rand who first stated, “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights, cannot claim to be defenders of minorities”, not Jordan Peterson.
Also, Samantha clearly hasn’t had much exposure to university life in New Jersey. She suggested Princeton might be a useful resource for learning about Western Civ and constitutional law. Princeton? Really? Did she forget Princeton renamed it’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? Well, ok. Wilson was a progressive racist.
How about Princeton’s President Eisgruber telling the world that, “Princeton is a racist school”.
How about the ongoing debate at Rutgers to rename the university because of it’s “racist” past. How about when Rutgers Dean of Colleges wrote on the school website, “There’s no such thing as free speech”. ( Rutgers is a public university.) There’s so much more.
Such acts of woke self-flagellation reinforce the notion that academia’s primary purpose is no longer to challenge students thinking and impart a well rounded education.
NJ is one of the de facto socialist states in America (my opinion).
Here’s a really good resource for assessing just how bad a school is on free speech: https://www.thefire.org/. I suspect many are already familiar with it. It contains objective measures on issues that are important to supporters of free speech.
If you read the piece more carefully, the author wasn’t talking about Princeton as a whole, but of a specific group/society on Princeton’s Campus. The James Madison Program advocates conservative thought, and is somewhat of an oasis for non-radicals, from my understanding. They also work to bring conservative speakers to the campus, with varying degrees of success. I visited with some members of the group when I visited Princeton, and it seems to be a well-established if small group that actually attempts to bring some intellectual diversity to the campus, and succeeds often, much to the dismay of their liberal/leftist peers. It’s a great group, and I’d encourage you to look it up.
You’re right that Princeton is… not a very intellectually diverse place, to say the least, although it is unfortunately probably the most friendly to conservatives (not very, but with some small lights like the James Madison Program) of the Ivies at the moment, and it’s the only Ivy I applied to for that reason (I wasn’t accepted, but I wouldn’t have attended regardless. I chose St. John’s College, Annapolis, because I wanted to discuss the classics rather than be told what to think about them.)
But no, the author was talking about a conservative oasis on a woke campus, not about the woke campus itself.
Kat B.-
If you value your liberty and free will, you should be happy Princeton turned down your app. I was not kidding when I referred to NJ as a de facto socialist state.
Phil Murphy, our governor and a former executive at Goldman Sachs who has an apartment in Germany, etc. marched with BLM rioters.
NYC and NY is no better. The only people who visit NYC are tourists and rich people who can afford to live there. Even they are moving out!
…because Goldman Sachs is such a bastion of socialism…
Kat B.,
As a current employee at Princeton and a former employee at St. John’s College, Santa Fe, I can tell you with good authority that you chose to attend the better of the two schools. You will be intellectually challenged at St. John’s in ways you never dreamed possible. Princeton has the name recognition and Ivy League stature, but St. John’s provides a far superior educational foundation for its students. (And I thoroughly enjoyed attending the annual Annapolis Cup croquet match)
Progressive != radical; There are indeed radical conservatives. It seems ineffective to criticize ideological bent with ideological bent.
thanks, my mind was in a coma reading all of this she was just openly justifying as “opression from the left”.
If you want to go after universities, hit them where it hurts: donations. Target the alumni foundations and start campaigns to have major donors either pull their backing outright or force the institutions to explain the purpose behind all these “diversity” offices. All major universities have their offshore banks (foundations) to deal with the dirty work of raising funds. Hit them there.
That’s a great idea!
When Johns Hopkins University attempted wokeness about 10 years ago the alum, many foreign graduates who don’t share America’s obsession with white guilt, did just that. Endowments stopped. It hit JHU hard. The administration retreated, thankfully. Now JHU is facing another crisis, this time with fou der himself. Apparently John’s Hopkins, a feminist progressive who took his mother’s maiden name as his own , might have owned a slave. Demands to remove his name and any statues and pictures are underway by the woke mob, supported of course by corporate media.
As an alumnus of JHU I will a point of not leaving them any money or contributing in any manner if they try to remove the name or statues of Johns Hopkins.
I blame Brene Brown to an extent. She makes so much sense for the first 75% of any talk she gives, and then she lights rhetorical torches to radicalize people over a concept of racial justice that victimizes people who are guiltless in America’s racial struggles. She encourages people who feel no guilt to persecute others who rightfully feel no guilt either, and calls that justice. The sad thing is these corporate leaders she teaches have the highest guilt of all because people with large sums of money are the reason the rest of us are so at risk.
Universal protection is the answer.
Why doesn’t the Democrat Slavery & Abortion party defund itself.
Abortion is, after all, suicide by proxy, and isn’t that why Democrats should be paying all reparations for the racism they singularly represent.
Excellent point. I’d also offer a healthy dose of 2 forms of competition; one “inner” academic and one without:
Online college eliminates 80% of the social settings to brainwash students. Earlier “criticisms” of these degrees as “a joke, not real degrees” has been overcome through natural evolution, huge growth of these programs, profitability and most importantly- earning power to graduates. Secondly, the rise and need of trade schools who don’t care about wokeness or ideology. When’s the last time someone requested the ideology & political stance of an HVAC installer or auto mechanic? Add in “coding” or other technical fields that have an extremely high demand that have nothing to do with a degree or what college degree is hanging on the wall.
Young, impressionable adults (as was I) should be more concerned with “what do you want or need to to be secure, motivated and achieve monetarily” rather than “what do you want to be or study”
The latter has been the norm, which feeds liberal universities. Expect pushback from HS, prep schools & Counselors- but who cares.
Remember the University of Missouri a few years back when they supported & engaged in woke groupspeak through BLM? It was a financial disaster for them.
YES! I was advocating this decades ago. Let the new slogan be DEFUND THE COLLEGES!
About half the country is conservative just by the metric of voting. I believe substantially more than half (maybe 2/3) is “unwoke”. Why then are universities – many of which are publicly funded – 99%+ staffed by rabid leftists of all varieties: liberals, progressives, extreme feminists, minority nationalists/racial supremacists, LGBTQists, socialists, self-hating whites {a category all their own}, Marxists, and outright communists? Why have we put up with this for so long?!
This situation was already well underway when I graduated from one of the Ivies in 1982. Granted, I was a loud and proud Reaganite (actually, well to Reagan’s Right, but I was too ignorant at the time to know how liberal Reagan actually was; his 1986 Treason Amnesty disabused me), and my professors knew it. This did not stop them from writing excellent recs for me for grad school. But – the professors I had do the recs, with one critical exception, were all older white (or Jewish) men. They were all liberals, with one open Marxist who nevertheless had “old school” intellectual integrity. Interestingly, the “critical exception” was an under-40 open homosexual who had actually been my senior thesis advisor, and had begged me to take his single senior seminar in my final year (I had had two prior courses with the prof in earlier years). Despite lavishly praising my scholastic work (and grading me accordingly – so at least he was honest to that extent), he then turned around and stabbed me in the back when I asked him to write a rec, telling me that he could not “in good conscience” recommend someone “so far to the Right”, who could one day “become a real danger to our diverse country” (yes, he said those words, and yes, “diversity” mongering had already started by 1982, at least within the elite schools).
Today, of course, the situation appears to be 100 times worse. But the writing was on the wall, probably as far back as the 60s. What did the Stupid Party and the useless conserve-nothing movement do about this leftist takeover of our opinion forming institutions? Nothing (or perhaps to reflect the “New America” {thanks, Ronnie!}, I should say “nada”).
Defunding he colleges, along with ending the Third World immigration invasion in all its aspects (as well as opposing socialism and cultural/social liberalism, and defending the Constitution and esp the 2ndAm), must be the foci of the Right (and all other patriots) henceforth.
In addition, try to reach parents and students and tell them how little earning power a degree in women;s studies, and anything with “studies” in the title, etc. have but the debt to get that degree will linger for years. Reach both the donors, the students and the parent’s of students.
Won’t happen with the new administration