As an aside, we should always be suspicious of anyone who claims to be "on the right side of history." History HAS no sides...or at least it shouldn't. People who make this claim often either have something to hide or are working an agenda.
I am thankful for your article. Now how does academy reform itself. I hate the apparent need to cut their funding and increase their responsibility for providing value to their students, but at this time I believe only outside FORCE will get their attention.
I was a consultant to higher ed for 40+ years, from the Ivy League to two-year community colleges in small towns, and I have several friends who were tenured faculty. I also taught as an adjunct at a local state college for several years.
I was invited to institutions to deal with, among other issues, personnel problems, improving supervision of student workers, customer service (yes, really), strategic planning, "teach the teachers to teach", and managing conflicts among faculty members. I also worked with governing boards and administrators.
Most of the professors I met with were more than competent: committed to their work and the success of their students. Good people. But I encountered a disturbingly large minority who felt tenure entitled them to rest in place. These were usually the people causing problems with their colleagues and the students: They felt entitled–even used the word to describe themselves as if it were a good thing–and seemed to feel that they no longer had to learn, grow, or make much effort to build working relationships with their peers. They had earned their spot in the sun, and now they were done. Teaching was an afterthought, and they did the bare minimum regarding research and publishing.
So, I had to learn to manage situations where these people were mostly not answerable for their actions - how they treated their students in the classroom, the days and weeks they skipped office hours and left their students stranded regarding assignments, their disruptive behavior at faculty meetings, their bullying behavior towards staff, etc. Their unacceptable behaviors had nothing to do with academic freedom, but that was the shield they would hide behind. They considered "accountability" as something that applied to lesser beings.
I don't want professors fired for stating unpopular ideas. But I feel less protective of the ones who don't show for class, treat students with contempt, and spend the years after acquiring tenure in hibernation until they retire.
Harvard came in last in nationwide free speech rankings by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). It seems the "freedom" Harvard is defending now is their freedom to suppress free speech. What a shame!
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
Enjoyed the article very much. Would like to see a profile done on a University that is internally taking measures to promote true academic freedom and viewpoint diversity, what specifically are they doing, pushback receiving, and ramifications.
"Academic freedom isn’t a right. It’s a deal." Great point, simply said, but helpful in my thinking about first amendment rights (which often don't extend to private schools) vs. abrogation of a different kind of duty among private schools that have failed in their mission-driven commitments to open inquiry and rational debate.
Great post. Science and knowledge have never been trusted; they were tested and retested to verify their truth value.
Universities were founded by a partnership of associations: between the masters or professors and the students. The word college means partnership in Latin. Students would attend lectures and pay per class attended. Masters were required to give original presentations and were not even allowed to read from prepared materials; moreover, they weren’t even permitted to “um” or break from their train of thought. This would result in the loss of their lecture position.
Today, most liberal arts students are being indoctrinated by activists, who markdown “wrong-thinking” students. This practice shows little or no sign of being reformed. Unless, students are in a STEM program they are wasting their parents’ money and incurring debt without receiving an asset of equal value (except for it signaling value).
On a personal note, I am embarrassed to admit that my own daughter is taking classes where she makes hand puppets or discusses subject matter that is equally worthless. I can hardly blame her for selecting these farcical classes which earn her credits towards her degree in psychology.
PS—My daughter will not be going to graduate school and will be seeking a position and a career in business marketing for beauty products.
Such a well-written piece. Ideology has rotted the "narrative" disciplines, ruined them, really. The examples are manifest, from the subjegation of arts criticism and understanding to grievance equations, to the interpretation of history and psychology through the lens of contemporary virtue-signaling fashions. But reform from within? Not sure how that's going to work. Like Pat Wagner comments above, these institutions are run by people who have long ago lost any sense of rational discourse; they are now in the throes of a pseudo-religious fervor that has no respect for logical analysis and open inquiry. And I am afraid that skepticism of vaccines should not be regarded a "conspiracy theory".
I was one of the original FAIR members back when I thought FAIR would honor its promise to support liberal values. But FAIR was just a bait and switch. It has consistently attacked, and continues to attack Woke progressives, but has no problem with Donald Trump's wholesale assault on our Constitutional Republic, science, and rule of law. Your aims have clearly been accomplished, although you lied from the start about what your aims were.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Charles, and I’m sorry you feel that FAIR has disappointed you.
Just to be clear, FAIR was created to defend classical liberal values of universal equality from identity-based practices and policies that foster discrimination, and also to advocate for free, open, and uncensored debate and inquiry in science.
Can you please elaborate on how you believe FAIR has failed in this regard?
First, thank you for responding to my comment. We may disagree, but, as Karl Popper pointed out, through open discussion we may get a little closer to the truth.
When I first joined FAIR many years ago it was because I was concerned about our nation’s stark political, cultural, and social divisions and I thought FAIR was the kind of organization that might help us get back on track (see the selection from my Substack below.) Perhaps mistakenly, I thought that FAIR’s focus would be non-partisan, attacking untruths, superstitions, and biases across the political spectrum. Like many others at the time, my concern initially was with the WOKE agenda. However, FAIR grossly exaggerates the WOKE threat; WOKEsters are really small potatoes. It has always been obvious to me, and should have been to everyone, that the real danger to enlightenment values and our Republic came from Donald Trump and his MAGA brownshirts. In particular, the evangelical would-be theocrats who constitute more than half of his mob. As time passed, it became clear to me that FAIR has never been anything more than a MAGA mouthpiece. I guess that was the plan from the get-go. My mistake.
Here's a personal note. A few years ago, my daughter graduated from NYU with an MA in psychology. Now, NYU is widely regarded as an epicenter of WOKEism, so I was a bit concerned that her education might be badly biased. As it turned out, she got a terrific education. Her advisor, Pascal Wallisch, was one of the most brilliant, and least WOKE, people I have ever met (and I have met many, many brilliant people.) Jonathan Haidt was also on the psych faculty. He is hardly a WOKE ideologue. Maybe the system ain't as broke as FAIR represents it to be.
For more information about me, feel free to browse my Substack.
Here is a somewhat extended selection from a recent post: “Why Kamela Lost in 9 Simple Charts.” I would be happy to continue the discussion, but maybe using email might be more appropriate. I am completely obsessed with all of this and, like you, I am determined to come as close to the truth as possible.
IT'S NOT JUST THE ECONOMY, STUPID
As a long time and unrepentant finance bro, I know I must guard against thinking about things in purely economic terms. Economics famously assumes that people are rational, which is to say that they are more or less capable of perceiving their self-interest and acting accordingly. But this is often not the case. In 2018 I wrote a Substack post titled “The Tribe has Spoken” which explored some of the less rational forces underlying our nation’s political divide. In retrospect there is very little that I wrote then that I would change today. However, I would point out that it was written before the onset of Covid, and since then things have gotten much, much worse.
The post mainly homed in on two topics: the tribal nature of human beings and something Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment.” Ressentiment is the feeling of powerlessness and resentment that society’s disgruntled “losers” feel toward the perceived “winners” – convenient and often imaginary scapegoats. I am no Nietzsche scholar (does anyone really get him?), but I believe that ressentiment today is a pervasive force in American politics on both sides of the political divide. Everyone feels aggrieved, and many – especially on the right – are convinced that their birthright has been stolen from them by sinister “elites.” It is a supreme irony that this was a central theme of J. D. Vance’s bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Full disclosure: I do not consider myself a Democrat, especially as the party is now constituted. I consider myself a moderate, leaning conservative (in the Burkean sense). I believe strongly that the Democrat’s “Woke” left wing was the single critical factor in Harris’ defeat. Religious fanaticism – let’s call it what it is – characterizes both the Woke left and the MAGA right, and fanaticism is always destructive of liberal institutions. But the Democrats have one point in their favor; they have not attempted to overthrow a fair election with an armed insurrection. To me, that counts for a lot.
Make that two points; the Democratic party still has many leaders who I respect and who I would trust to run the country. Chris Murphy, Chris Coons, John Warner, Josh Schapiro, Pete Buttigieg, and my own representative Chrissy Houlahan, among many others. Other than perhaps Lisa Murkowski, I can’t think of anyone in the Republican Party I would even allow into my house.
I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are steadily alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – overcame whatever distaste for Trump they might have had and did just that.
I think the humanities in the universities need to wither away. I don't know what else should. The humanities, more than anything else, can be learned on one's own if you are interested. I had to take humanities course in college, of course, and I had a useful foundation from being home schooled as a small child, but I learned more than I ever learned in college from listening to Teaching Company and Great Courses lectures. People will do that when they are ready or else never. And the ideas that the humanities might produce? Those can be funded outside of universities, more appropriately.
The problem with this idea is the majority of the sources you used were produced by...people educated in the humanities at universities. You can also extend this position to the vast majority of professions. Many computer programmers learned their trade on their own while universities were still trying to decide if computers belonged in science, math, or engineering. Most of the trades still educate though apprenticeships, and not so long ago it was possible to apprentice to be an accountant or read law with a practicing lawyer and start off that way. But in all those cases you're still looking at a novice learning from an experienced veteran in the craft. I think you're confusing what universities have become with what they once were and could be again if people stopped using them as a paid high school diploma.
Can you connect the statements on the two sides of the ellipsis? The lectures I occasionally listen to were generally delivered by people who went to a university at some earlier period in their life. And, therefore, ...?
The point being if you don't have those people coming from somewhere, you lose the lectures you benefitted from. Eventually those people will die, and their lectures will become as dated as someone lecturing on the benefits of eugenics (for example). If you allow the humanities to "wither away," you lose the ability for them to advance. Maybe you're fine with that. I don't know. And considering the number of computer programmers/coders who are self taught (to give one example), I'd say that's actually easier to come by than competence in the humanities. And private funding for meaningful historical research? Doesn't happen on the whole.
Actually, I don't lose those lectures unless they're destroyed. They might be destroyed, like most things, of course. But they're as likely to be destroyed by people educated in the current version of the humanities because they are too <whatever everybody is objecting to these days> as by anybody else, or by those incited by them. I want the humanities in college to wither away because they have reached the worse-than-useless point.
And you'd rather surrender them to things like the New York Times (the people who brought us the 1619 Project)? Hard pass for me, thanks. But you do you.
Personally I don't think this can ever be fixed until the scientists and academics who knelt to the woke paradigm are either completely removed from the field or have their lives totally destroyed. Part of this is simple fairness: a lot of people - myself included - faced severe consequences to our careers and finances because we refused to kneel to the woke paradigm. Until we receive justice, there can be no peace, and justice means that we must be made COMPLETELY whole. In other words, our career tracks should be accelerated to the point where it completely makes up for the setback we experienced due to our persecution under the woke paradigm, and that acceleration should come at the direct expense of all the worthless human garbage who kneeled and pretended to believe in the woke lie. The fact that they are ahead of us in terms of their careers and finances is a travesty of justice, especially now in hindsight when we all know how wrong they were. Their success and wealth - unfairly given to them thank to their willingness to bow to political pressures -must be stripped away and redistributed to the people like me who were hurt by the woke paradigm, so that everyone knows restitution has been made and the victims of wokeness have been made whole.
This is not just about justice: it is also about giving people the correct incentives. I am somewhat sympathetic to those who pretended to believe in wokeness because they were scared, but if you kneel and offer deference to whichever political faction frightens you the most, then the logical response is for me to ensure that my political faction is always the most terrifying. Oh, you bowed to the woke mob because you were scared of career consequences and financial repercussions? Then I imagine you'll bow even quicker to the ANTI-woke mob that's willing to burn down your house and slaughter your children. Don't blame me: these are just the incentives you gave us. When scientists show that they're willing to compromise their integrity just because they're afraid of left-wing pressure, then the most optimal game-theory move is for conservatives to become so terrifying that we give those scientists nightmares. When you show that fear works to control you, then our best currency to interact with you should obviously be fear. By cowtowing to political pressure, these scientists incentivized a race to the bottom, where "the bottom" is "who can terrorize them the most effectively?" And it doesn't take much of a genius to know that's people like me.
As an aside, we should always be suspicious of anyone who claims to be "on the right side of history." History HAS no sides...or at least it shouldn't. People who make this claim often either have something to hide or are working an agenda.
I am thankful for your article. Now how does academy reform itself. I hate the apparent need to cut their funding and increase their responsibility for providing value to their students, but at this time I believe only outside FORCE will get their attention.
Institutions, like the people making them up, generally respond better to incentives than reasoned arguments.
This was a truly excellent article. One of the best FAIR has ever posted. Thank you.
I was a consultant to higher ed for 40+ years, from the Ivy League to two-year community colleges in small towns, and I have several friends who were tenured faculty. I also taught as an adjunct at a local state college for several years.
I was invited to institutions to deal with, among other issues, personnel problems, improving supervision of student workers, customer service (yes, really), strategic planning, "teach the teachers to teach", and managing conflicts among faculty members. I also worked with governing boards and administrators.
Most of the professors I met with were more than competent: committed to their work and the success of their students. Good people. But I encountered a disturbingly large minority who felt tenure entitled them to rest in place. These were usually the people causing problems with their colleagues and the students: They felt entitled–even used the word to describe themselves as if it were a good thing–and seemed to feel that they no longer had to learn, grow, or make much effort to build working relationships with their peers. They had earned their spot in the sun, and now they were done. Teaching was an afterthought, and they did the bare minimum regarding research and publishing.
So, I had to learn to manage situations where these people were mostly not answerable for their actions - how they treated their students in the classroom, the days and weeks they skipped office hours and left their students stranded regarding assignments, their disruptive behavior at faculty meetings, their bullying behavior towards staff, etc. Their unacceptable behaviors had nothing to do with academic freedom, but that was the shield they would hide behind. They considered "accountability" as something that applied to lesser beings.
I don't want professors fired for stating unpopular ideas. But I feel less protective of the ones who don't show for class, treat students with contempt, and spend the years after acquiring tenure in hibernation until they retire.
Harvard came in last in nationwide free speech rankings by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). It seems the "freedom" Harvard is defending now is their freedom to suppress free speech. What a shame!
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
Enjoyed the article very much. Would like to see a profile done on a University that is internally taking measures to promote true academic freedom and viewpoint diversity, what specifically are they doing, pushback receiving, and ramifications.
"Academic freedom isn’t a right. It’s a deal." Great point, simply said, but helpful in my thinking about first amendment rights (which often don't extend to private schools) vs. abrogation of a different kind of duty among private schools that have failed in their mission-driven commitments to open inquiry and rational debate.
Very insightful. I submitted the entire article, fully credited, to Yale's new Trust in Higher Education Committee as community input, fyi.
Thank you! Hope some ideas expressed here make a useful contribution to the debate.
This opinion is a bunch of right-wing gobbledeegook.
Academic freedom needs to once again be a left-wing value.
Great post. Science and knowledge have never been trusted; they were tested and retested to verify their truth value.
Universities were founded by a partnership of associations: between the masters or professors and the students. The word college means partnership in Latin. Students would attend lectures and pay per class attended. Masters were required to give original presentations and were not even allowed to read from prepared materials; moreover, they weren’t even permitted to “um” or break from their train of thought. This would result in the loss of their lecture position.
Today, most liberal arts students are being indoctrinated by activists, who markdown “wrong-thinking” students. This practice shows little or no sign of being reformed. Unless, students are in a STEM program they are wasting their parents’ money and incurring debt without receiving an asset of equal value (except for it signaling value).
On a personal note, I am embarrassed to admit that my own daughter is taking classes where she makes hand puppets or discusses subject matter that is equally worthless. I can hardly blame her for selecting these farcical classes which earn her credits towards her degree in psychology.
PS—My daughter will not be going to graduate school and will be seeking a position and a career in business marketing for beauty products.
Such a well-written piece. Ideology has rotted the "narrative" disciplines, ruined them, really. The examples are manifest, from the subjegation of arts criticism and understanding to grievance equations, to the interpretation of history and psychology through the lens of contemporary virtue-signaling fashions. But reform from within? Not sure how that's going to work. Like Pat Wagner comments above, these institutions are run by people who have long ago lost any sense of rational discourse; they are now in the throes of a pseudo-religious fervor that has no respect for logical analysis and open inquiry. And I am afraid that skepticism of vaccines should not be regarded a "conspiracy theory".
I was one of the original FAIR members back when I thought FAIR would honor its promise to support liberal values. But FAIR was just a bait and switch. It has consistently attacked, and continues to attack Woke progressives, but has no problem with Donald Trump's wholesale assault on our Constitutional Republic, science, and rule of law. Your aims have clearly been accomplished, although you lied from the start about what your aims were.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts, Charles, and I’m sorry you feel that FAIR has disappointed you.
Just to be clear, FAIR was created to defend classical liberal values of universal equality from identity-based practices and policies that foster discrimination, and also to advocate for free, open, and uncensored debate and inquiry in science.
Can you please elaborate on how you believe FAIR has failed in this regard?
First, thank you for responding to my comment. We may disagree, but, as Karl Popper pointed out, through open discussion we may get a little closer to the truth.
When I first joined FAIR many years ago it was because I was concerned about our nation’s stark political, cultural, and social divisions and I thought FAIR was the kind of organization that might help us get back on track (see the selection from my Substack below.) Perhaps mistakenly, I thought that FAIR’s focus would be non-partisan, attacking untruths, superstitions, and biases across the political spectrum. Like many others at the time, my concern initially was with the WOKE agenda. However, FAIR grossly exaggerates the WOKE threat; WOKEsters are really small potatoes. It has always been obvious to me, and should have been to everyone, that the real danger to enlightenment values and our Republic came from Donald Trump and his MAGA brownshirts. In particular, the evangelical would-be theocrats who constitute more than half of his mob. As time passed, it became clear to me that FAIR has never been anything more than a MAGA mouthpiece. I guess that was the plan from the get-go. My mistake.
Here's a personal note. A few years ago, my daughter graduated from NYU with an MA in psychology. Now, NYU is widely regarded as an epicenter of WOKEism, so I was a bit concerned that her education might be badly biased. As it turned out, she got a terrific education. Her advisor, Pascal Wallisch, was one of the most brilliant, and least WOKE, people I have ever met (and I have met many, many brilliant people.) Jonathan Haidt was also on the psych faculty. He is hardly a WOKE ideologue. Maybe the system ain't as broke as FAIR represents it to be.
For more information about me, feel free to browse my Substack.
Here is a somewhat extended selection from a recent post: “Why Kamela Lost in 9 Simple Charts.” I would be happy to continue the discussion, but maybe using email might be more appropriate. I am completely obsessed with all of this and, like you, I am determined to come as close to the truth as possible.
IT'S NOT JUST THE ECONOMY, STUPID
As a long time and unrepentant finance bro, I know I must guard against thinking about things in purely economic terms. Economics famously assumes that people are rational, which is to say that they are more or less capable of perceiving their self-interest and acting accordingly. But this is often not the case. In 2018 I wrote a Substack post titled “The Tribe has Spoken” which explored some of the less rational forces underlying our nation’s political divide. In retrospect there is very little that I wrote then that I would change today. However, I would point out that it was written before the onset of Covid, and since then things have gotten much, much worse.
The post mainly homed in on two topics: the tribal nature of human beings and something Friedrich Nietzsche called “ressentiment.” Ressentiment is the feeling of powerlessness and resentment that society’s disgruntled “losers” feel toward the perceived “winners” – convenient and often imaginary scapegoats. I am no Nietzsche scholar (does anyone really get him?), but I believe that ressentiment today is a pervasive force in American politics on both sides of the political divide. Everyone feels aggrieved, and many – especially on the right – are convinced that their birthright has been stolen from them by sinister “elites.” It is a supreme irony that this was a central theme of J. D. Vance’s bestseller “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Full disclosure: I do not consider myself a Democrat, especially as the party is now constituted. I consider myself a moderate, leaning conservative (in the Burkean sense). I believe strongly that the Democrat’s “Woke” left wing was the single critical factor in Harris’ defeat. Religious fanaticism – let’s call it what it is – characterizes both the Woke left and the MAGA right, and fanaticism is always destructive of liberal institutions. But the Democrats have one point in their favor; they have not attempted to overthrow a fair election with an armed insurrection. To me, that counts for a lot.
Make that two points; the Democratic party still has many leaders who I respect and who I would trust to run the country. Chris Murphy, Chris Coons, John Warner, Josh Schapiro, Pete Buttigieg, and my own representative Chrissy Houlahan, among many others. Other than perhaps Lisa Murkowski, I can’t think of anyone in the Republican Party I would even allow into my house.
I’d like to finish with a point that is perhaps controversial and unoriginal but needs to be hammered home; it should now be crystal clear that Democrats are steadily alienating male voters – mostly white ones, but increasingly many who are nonwhite. This is dismissed as “misogyny” by many Democrats and there is certainly plenty of that. But when one gender and one race is singled out as the source of all that is evil and nothing that is good in a nation that they themselves were instrumental in building (to say the least), members of that group can become disheartened. No one wants to be a member of a party that considers him the enemy. I must say that I share this feeling (I have never oppressed anyone). For me, no amount of frustration with Democrats would ever make me vote for human beings as despicable as Donald Trump and his brownshirts. But clearly, tens of millions of men -- white, black and brown – overcame whatever distaste for Trump they might have had and did just that.
Wow. Really well put!
I think the humanities in the universities need to wither away. I don't know what else should. The humanities, more than anything else, can be learned on one's own if you are interested. I had to take humanities course in college, of course, and I had a useful foundation from being home schooled as a small child, but I learned more than I ever learned in college from listening to Teaching Company and Great Courses lectures. People will do that when they are ready or else never. And the ideas that the humanities might produce? Those can be funded outside of universities, more appropriately.
The problem with this idea is the majority of the sources you used were produced by...people educated in the humanities at universities. You can also extend this position to the vast majority of professions. Many computer programmers learned their trade on their own while universities were still trying to decide if computers belonged in science, math, or engineering. Most of the trades still educate though apprenticeships, and not so long ago it was possible to apprentice to be an accountant or read law with a practicing lawyer and start off that way. But in all those cases you're still looking at a novice learning from an experienced veteran in the craft. I think you're confusing what universities have become with what they once were and could be again if people stopped using them as a paid high school diploma.
Can you connect the statements on the two sides of the ellipsis? The lectures I occasionally listen to were generally delivered by people who went to a university at some earlier period in their life. And, therefore, ...?
The point being if you don't have those people coming from somewhere, you lose the lectures you benefitted from. Eventually those people will die, and their lectures will become as dated as someone lecturing on the benefits of eugenics (for example). If you allow the humanities to "wither away," you lose the ability for them to advance. Maybe you're fine with that. I don't know. And considering the number of computer programmers/coders who are self taught (to give one example), I'd say that's actually easier to come by than competence in the humanities. And private funding for meaningful historical research? Doesn't happen on the whole.
Actually, I don't lose those lectures unless they're destroyed. They might be destroyed, like most things, of course. But they're as likely to be destroyed by people educated in the current version of the humanities because they are too <whatever everybody is objecting to these days> as by anybody else, or by those incited by them. I want the humanities in college to wither away because they have reached the worse-than-useless point.
And you'd rather surrender them to things like the New York Times (the people who brought us the 1619 Project)? Hard pass for me, thanks. But you do you.
Your ideas don't seem to connect with each other very well.
Great post!
Personally I don't think this can ever be fixed until the scientists and academics who knelt to the woke paradigm are either completely removed from the field or have their lives totally destroyed. Part of this is simple fairness: a lot of people - myself included - faced severe consequences to our careers and finances because we refused to kneel to the woke paradigm. Until we receive justice, there can be no peace, and justice means that we must be made COMPLETELY whole. In other words, our career tracks should be accelerated to the point where it completely makes up for the setback we experienced due to our persecution under the woke paradigm, and that acceleration should come at the direct expense of all the worthless human garbage who kneeled and pretended to believe in the woke lie. The fact that they are ahead of us in terms of their careers and finances is a travesty of justice, especially now in hindsight when we all know how wrong they were. Their success and wealth - unfairly given to them thank to their willingness to bow to political pressures -must be stripped away and redistributed to the people like me who were hurt by the woke paradigm, so that everyone knows restitution has been made and the victims of wokeness have been made whole.
This is not just about justice: it is also about giving people the correct incentives. I am somewhat sympathetic to those who pretended to believe in wokeness because they were scared, but if you kneel and offer deference to whichever political faction frightens you the most, then the logical response is for me to ensure that my political faction is always the most terrifying. Oh, you bowed to the woke mob because you were scared of career consequences and financial repercussions? Then I imagine you'll bow even quicker to the ANTI-woke mob that's willing to burn down your house and slaughter your children. Don't blame me: these are just the incentives you gave us. When scientists show that they're willing to compromise their integrity just because they're afraid of left-wing pressure, then the most optimal game-theory move is for conservatives to become so terrifying that we give those scientists nightmares. When you show that fear works to control you, then our best currency to interact with you should obviously be fear. By cowtowing to political pressure, these scientists incentivized a race to the bottom, where "the bottom" is "who can terrorize them the most effectively?" And it doesn't take much of a genius to know that's people like me.
https://questioner.substack.com/p/asymmetrical-warfare