Religion is a Mental Illness

Why I Left the Left

Not your typical red pill narrative

freeblackthought.substack.com

Not your typical red pill narrative

There are so many “why I left the left” stories, but I promise you this isn’t your typical red pill narrative. I didn't go from a Democrat to a Republican or a woke leftist to a conservative. This false dichotomy—this idea that there's only left and right—is how I got into this mess in the first place. I want to discuss how I ended up on the left, why I left the left, and where I stand now as someone disappointed by both political options we are presented with today.

As a Gen Z individual, I witnessed social media indoctrinating many people my age into wokeness. For me, it was through school. My home culture played a part, especially the heavy emphasis on identity politics, where being black was supposed to determine my decisions, particularly political ones. But the full woke hierarchy—the idea that every aspect of your identity has to be categorized as either oppressed or oppressor—was introduced to me through my school’s DEI program. Affinity groups at school, separated by race to discuss oppression, introduced me to the privilege-oppressed hierarchy, or what could be called the “whose-feelings-matter-more hierarchy.”

I learned that white people were more privileged than non-white people, men more privileged than women, straight people more privileged than gay people, Christians more privileged than Muslims, and so on. This was supposed to determine a person's morality—judging people not by their actions or words but by these arbitrary labels of “oppressed” or “privileged” based on group identity.

At first, I didn’t buy into the DEI identity politics because it contradicted what I saw with my own eyes. I had friends of all races. I had friends that were men. I had friends that I was being told were more “privileged” than I was, but I never felt oppressed or harmed by them. However, my views changed in 2016 when Trump was nominated for president. As a high school senior in Texas, I didn’t know much about his politics (I wasn’t following any of his speeches), but I heard from teachers that if Trump were elected, America would become a post-apocalyptic hellscape where my rights would be violated, and I would be enslaved or put into a concentration camp because I was a black woman.

Living in a predominantly Republican area, many of my friends supported Trump. I never questioned their support of Trump’s policies; I simply assumed my friends—my white friends, my male friends—were voting for someone who wanted to harm me because they were privileged. That was what I was being told and taught in school.

The next year, I went to MIT in Boston—one of the bluest cities in one of the bluest states—where the DEI and identity politics culture was even more intense. Everyone was paranoid about offending someone due to the serious social and academic repercussions. The DEI department at MIT was super intense, and you could get in serious trouble for offending someone with “hate speech,” a loosely defined term that pretty much meant asking, (1) Did you offend someone?, (2) How badly were their feelings hurt?, (3) And where are they relative to you in the hierarchy? The answers would determine what repercussions you’d face.

I don’t want to pretend this had everything to do with the people around me. There was no one putting a gun to my head and telling me I had to accept these crazy ideas. No one forced me to believe that you had to validate everyone’s pronouns and identities or else you were harming them. No one forced me to believe that you couldn’t wear certain makeup or hairstyles or you were harming them. No one forced me to believe that you couldn’t state certain factual truths about history or the world, or else you were harming people. All of these were ideas that I accepted willingly.

One of the craziest things that I believed during that time was that I was non-binary. For one thing, I wasn’t a very stereotypical girly girl, and I had (and still have) some traditionally masculine traits. I tend to prefer leadership positions, and I was told that if I didn’t identify as non-binary, I would be invalidating the people who did because I shared similarities with them in the way that I acted and behaved. But honestly, there was a second, subconscious reason: I knew, on some level, that if I identified as non-binary, I would gain more oppression points in the hierarchy. I wouldn’t feel so paranoid about my words offending people.

This paranoia (of offending people) was so intense—at least for me, and I would assume for others—that I was willing to accept something or to claim that I was something that wasn’t true. By the end of my first semester in college, I was at my most woke. I was paranoid about offending people, sensitive to being offended, and aggressive in policing others’ actions and words. I even reported people to the DEI department for being offensive. (I was a menace!)

But things changed when I got sick and was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. At 18, I ended up in the hospital with half of my body paralyzed, the youngest person in the adult ward of the hospital, in need of 24/7 care.

Even though I identified as non-binary, I was still biologically female. Needing a female nurse for my safety and personal comfort conflicted with my identity as non-binary and the fear of offending someone. To ask for a female nurse—to acknowledge a difference between male and female—meant invalidating my own non-binary identity. More importantly, I wondered about the hospital’s definition of “female.” What if I got a nurse who identified as a woman but wasn’t what I was asking for? In that case, I’d have to clarify what I meant by “female” or “woman,” which might offend someone. Offending someone (I thought at the time) meant harming them, which was the worst thing I could do.

So I’m sitting in the hospital, and I’m weighing these two alternatives: Either (1) I prioritize my safety, which means I have to give up everything that I think is moral, or (2) I do what I think is right, but that means putting myself potentially in a more dangerous situation. I decided to put my safety first. I asked for a female nurse. I was ready to specify what I wanted, but I was in Texas at the time, and this was 2018, so it was not an issue. Gender ideology wasn’t very widespread; they knew exactly what I was talking about, and I ended up with a nurse who was a woman.

But this led to a moral crisis. What I believed to be moral and what I believed to be true were at odds. And it wasn’t just this dilemma—I’d discovered a serious flaw in my entire path of thinking, a deeper philosophical issue. Were reality and morality incompatible? Surely, that couldn’t be right.

Returning to school, I had a lot of questions: Is it true that hurting someone’s feelings is the worst thing that we can do and is actually the equivalent of physically harming someone? We are pretending that “man” and “woman” don’t have definitions, but this conflicts with biological reality. Why are we doing this? Is it healthy to constantly live in fear and be paranoid about being a bad person when nothing that you’re doing or saying has any bad intent?

These questions led to a lot of pushback. Some people seemed nervous that I was asking questions, and they would either quickly change the topic or whisper something like, “Oh, of course, these ideas are true. Why are you even asking? We don’t ask if these ideas are true. It’s just obvious.” Some got angry: “Why are you asking questions?! Trump supporters ask these types of questions! Fox News right-wing conspiracy theorists ask these types of questions! Are you a Trump-supporting, Fox News-watching, right-wing conspiracy theorist?—because that means that you’re against us! Either you’re with us, or you’re against us, and if you’re asking these questions, you’re siding with the people who are trying to enslave you and put you in concentration camps and doing all of these evil things!” These reactions were, in retrospect, a very obvious red flag, and I wish that at this point I’d realized I was in a kind of cult, but unfortunately, I didn’t.

If it’s not obvious, everything that I believed at this time was something somebody else said that I blindly followed as if it were true. I didn’t have the self-esteem to think through these ideas and consider whether they made sense. My peers, family members, friends, and mentors accepted these ideas, so I had no legitimate reason to question or challenge them. I fell back into accepting these beliefs, or at least that’s how I made it appear. While I reverted to calling myself non-binary, policing other people’s language, and reporting people to the DEI department, I secretly struggled with the idea that this was all wrong.

I began to realize there were so many cracks, inconsistencies, and illogical aspects to what I believed that I couldn’t put my head back in the sand and pretend they weren’t there. This was a really hard time in my life. I became depressed because I believed that asking these questions and searching for the truth made me a bad person.

Then the COVID pandemic came along, which surprisingly saved my life. During lockdowns, I was forced to sit with my thoughts and acknowledge the doubts and confusions that I had without any of the external influences that kept me trapped in this mindset. After thinking things through, I concluded that almost everything I believed was bullshit. But I still needed an extra push to fully trust my brain.

I was struggling with that self-esteem bit when I coincidentally had a conversation with my brother, who was not a Trump supporter, didn’t watch Fox News, wasn’t a right-wing conspiracy theorist, and had no interest in politics at all. Out of nowhere, he asked me, “Have you met these people in Boston who are crazy? They can’t define what a woman is. They’re offended by everything. They think facts don’t matter if they hurt people’s feelings.” Hearing this from my non-political brother made me realize I wasn’t the only person asking these questions. It was the nudge I needed to accept that it’s okay to ask questions and to explore alternatives to the woke nonsense I’d been taught. I started to pay attention to what was happening around me and think through what people were saying, what they believed, and why.

COVID may have been the catalyst for me to reassess my beliefs, but it also hit me particularly hard. Living with an autoimmune disorder, I was one of the individuals the government claimed their policies around lockdowns, mask requirements, vaccine mandates, and other measures were intended to protect. Unfortunately, they did the opposite. I know how to take care of my health. I’ve been doing it for years. I know when to wear a mask, but the government mask mandate—in Boston, you had to wear masks in public spaces—caused the price of masks to skyrocket and, in many places, created a shortage. Getting a mask under those policies was much harder for me.

Further, I needed to go to my specialist for treatment, but I had to travel to get there. The government required vaccines to fly, but my disorder makes certain vaccines riskier. I faced a dilemma: Should I risk my health by getting the vaccine or by not getting it? Not getting it would mean that I couldn’t travel to see the one specialist who could treat my rare condition. The shutdowns were another challenge. I preferred staying home to avoid crowded grocery stores, but when they closed all “non-essential” businesses, the remaining “essential” ones became overwhelmed. This, again, led to shortages of necessities like food and medical supplies (not to mention toilet paper!), and since delivery services were also suspended, I was forced to venture out for supplies that were often out of stock. None of these policies improved my life in any way.

I remember confiding to some of my friends (who happened to be woke leftists), “Hey, I have an autoimmune disorder, and these policies are not helping me, I don’t think I support them.” Their unsympathetic response was, “Are you listening to Trump supporters? Are you watching Fox News? Are you suddenly a right-wing conspiracy theorist?!”

Not long after, the BLM riots happened, and I had friends who couldn’t leave their houses because they were under curfew. It became apparent that these riots stemmed from non-factual beliefs about a police shooting. I remember asking questions like, “Do you really think that burning down buildings and businesses is going to get you what you want in this situation, which is policy change?” And the response that I got back was (can you guess?) that I must be a Trump-supporting, Fox News-watching, right-wing conspiracy theorist. There were no facts or logic behind their beliefs, just parroting what they heard, believing it made them good people.

Many had their “red pill” moment in 2020, leaving the Democrats and embracing conservatism. And let me be honest: when I left the left, I first called myself a conservative, not because I believed everything conservatives said, but because I saw it as the lesser of two evils. When I took the time to explore the full range of ideas out there—because there’s more than just woke or conservative, there’s more than just Democrat or Republican—I realized that I didn’t have to call myself a conservative or woke. Neither label applied. I realized I could reject both, and I did.

The conservative movement has almost all of the same flaws as wokeness. Many conservatives are easily offended, valuing faith and feelings over facts. They might get upset when they see a man wearing a dress, a woman expressing her choice not to marry or have children, or someone speaking Spanish (rather than English) at the grocery store. Many conservatives are religious, and like wokeness, their beliefs often lack a factual or evidentiary basis. Christianity, like gender ideology, relies heavily on subjective belief. I was briefly labeled a conspiracy theorist for expressing some ideas associated with conservatives, and I even joked about it. But there’s truth to the stereotype. Many conservatives blindly accept claims from sources like Fox News or personalities like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens without demanding evidence.

Conservatives often engage in identity politics as well. It’s common to see individuals on social media disparage the achievements of black people, attributing their success to affirmative action or DEI policies without evidence or consideration of the individual’s merits. They make assumptions based solely on race, mirroring the flawed privileged-oppressed hierarchy often associated with the left. This is the point where some will say, “Oh okay, well you’re not an ‘extremist,’ you don’t believe in the extreme left or the extreme right, so therefore you’re a ‘centrist,’ you’re somewhere in the middle—you believe in a mix of both.” Frankly, that’s absurd. I don’t think of myself as halfway between crazy and crazy. Rational thinking is not on a spectrum with crazy at each pole; consequently, I reject this left-right dichotomy altogether. It’s illogical to place conservatives on one end of a spectrum and woke people on the other. I don’t identify as woke, conservative, or a centrist. So, what am I?

First, I am a rational thinker. I value logic, facts, and evidence. I think for myself. You won’t hear me deferring to anybody else to determine my views. I will never say, “Oh yeah, so-and-so thinks this is true, or so-and-so has these credentials, therefore, everything they say is right.” That’s not how I think. I also will never claim morality should be based on people’s feelings regardless of facts; morality and reality are not opposed. Second, I consider myself an individualist. I completely reject the idea that someone’s race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, or any of these unchosen characteristics determine what somebody should say or do, how they should think, or how they should be judged. I have my brain, as everybody else on the planet does, so I will judge each person based on their beliefs and actions in their unique circumstances, not based on some unchosen group they’re part of. Third, I’m a capitalist without apology. I believe in the individual’s capacity for rational thought. Every person should be allowed to live according to what they know best suits their circumstances.

I don’t believe that either the Democrats or the Republicans truly embody these ideals. They fail to grasp that people have their own minds and require the freedom to make decisions for their own lives. This lack of understanding is reflected in their policies. Someone will inevitably say, “Well, you must be a libertarian.” No, I don’t identify as a libertarian, and the reason behind that deserves its own dedicated story (perhaps I’ll share one if there’s enough interest).

Despite the abundance of “why I left the left” stories out there, my motivation for sharing this testimonial stems from the realization that many people find themselves in a situation similar to mine. They are abandoning the left, recognizing the presence of an incredibly bizarre and cultish ideology that’s reaching a boiling point. Yet, they’re simultaneously dissatisfied with what they observe in the conservative movement, leaving them feeling lost and unsure where to turn. Like me, they feel politically homeless.

I understand that this sense of political homelessness can be isolating, but I want to assure anyone experiencing these feelings that you are not alone. Countless individuals share our perspective, and I am committed to creating content that challenges the false dichotomy that you must be either left or right, Republican or Democrat, conservative or woke. This notion is fundamentally flawed and simply untrue.

There are many ways of thinking, and I want to explore them on my YouTube channel and in other forums, including the Journal of Free Black Thought. You can be your own person. Build trust in yourself, use your brain, and come to your own conclusions about things. How do you describe your political philosophy or orientation? Do you consider yourself left or right, woke or conservative, Democrat or Republican, or libertarian? Or are you politically homeless like me?

Kiyah Willis is a fellow at Objective Standard Institute focusing on cultural trends and their causes and consequences. A graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Kiyah worked as a data analyst before transitioning to philosophy. You can find her advocating reason, individualism, and liberty on Twitter and TikTok and on her Substack, Growing to Truth.

Editors’ note: This essay is a lightly edited transcript of a YouTube monolog. The video is linked below, in the body of the essay.

Yale Tells Hopeful Scientists: You Must Commit to DEI

One department seeks applicants who "feel personal responsibility for helping to create an equitable and inclusive environment."

https://www.thefp.com/

Want to be a molecular biologist at Yale? Well, make sure you have a ten-step plan for dismantling systemic racism. When making hires at Yale’s department of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, faculty are told to place “DEI at the center of every decision,” according to a document tucked away on its website. 

Meanwhile, every job advertised on the site links to a DEI “rubric” that tests candidates’ “knowledge of DEI and commitment to promoting DEI,” their “past DEI experiences and activities,” and their “future DEI goals and plans.”

The questions are designed to find out how they would infuse diversity, equity, and inclusion—a focus on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories of “marginalization”—into their work. 

Applicants for professor and lecturer jobs, currently advertised on the site, will get “zero” points if they:

• Have “no knowledge or awareness about DEI issues” 
• Do “not feel personal responsibility for helping to create an equitable and inclusive environment” 
• Were “not involved in activities that promote DEI” 
• Have “no goals or plans for promoting DEI”

But they are marked “exceptional” if they:

• Have “clear knowledge of DEI issues” 
• Can demonstrate “strong interest in contributing to promoting DEI in teaching” 
• Have a “sustained track record of multiple efforts in promoting DEI” 
• Show a “clear and detailed plan for promoting DEI through teaching”

The assessment puts the thumb on the scale for those with progressive sensibilities. Scientists earn a high score in the category of “DEI knowledge” by showing they understand the “specific challenges faced by underrepresented minorities”—a criterion likely to favor those with a strong faith in the concepts of microaggressions, implicit bias, and systemic racism.

Diversity statements raise serious issues about free expression, and they also signal an ill-advised shift in priority—away from disciplinary excellence and toward social activism. 

As one of the world’s most influential universities, Yale has popularized diversity statements. But they are finally past their expiration date. Yale should wield its influence and join MIT in putting an end to this misguided experiment.

‘Most qualified person should get the job’ is microaggression, Russell Group universities say

Academics say guidance on eliminating subtle forms of discrimination undermines a culture of free inquiry

The Telegraph

Russell Group universities have told staff and students that saying “the most qualified person should get the job” is a “microaggression”.

At least five universities have issued guidance or training courses on how to eliminate “microaggression”, which are defined as subtle or indirect forms of discrimination.

Guidance from the University of Glasgow and the engineering department of Imperial College London states that saying “the most qualified person should get the job” is an example of a microaggression.

Glasgow’s guidance, which forms part of the university’s anti-racism campaign, suggests that the statement would be wrong because it asserts “that race does not play a role in life successes”.

Other examples of microaggressions listed by the university include saying that “everyone can succeed if they work hard enough”. The university states that possible implications of the statement could include suggesting that someone only got a job because of quotas, or that they cannot make a valuable contribution.

Other statements listed as microaggressions by Imperial include “men and women have equal opportunities for achievement” and “positive action is racist”.

Meanwhile, the University of Edinburgh states that microaggressions often take the form of “questioning an individual’s lived experience” or “denying individual prejudice”.

Examples cited by the university include saying of a third person: “I’m sure they didn’t mean anything by that”, or denying that a person is a racist.

Newcastle University describes microaggressions as “the everyday slights, indignities, put downs and insults that people of colour, women, people from LGBTQIA+ communities or those who are marginalised, experience in their day-to-day interactions with people”.

It lists examples such as a white person telling a black person “white people get killed by the police too”, when discussing police brutality.

The microaggression statements from universities were uncovered by the Committee for Academic Freedom (CAF), a group of academics worried about the erosion of free speech on campus.

Dr Edward Skidelsky, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Exeter, who is director of the CAF, said: “By campaigning against questioning and denial, these universities are advocating an uncritical acceptance of statements in the various, undefined areas that their microaggression guides refer to. The effect, again, is to undermine a culture of free inquiry.

“Universities must not campaign against the expression of lawful beliefs. They must not take official positions. They must not outlaw ‘questioning’ and ‘denial’. They must not undermine free inquiry.”

Chris McGovern, the chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “It would seem that the woke virus has infected universities in a major way. It is cowardly. Universities are supposed to show their intelligence and reason and they are disapplying their intelligence and reason in order to pursue the woke agenda.”

The universities have been contacted for comment.

Three Ivy League presidents made international headlines when they told a recent congressional hearing that calls for the genocide of Jews would only contravene their bullying and harassment policies “depending on the context”.

In response to their testimony – which went viral – wealthy individuals cancelled donations in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and one of the presidents, Liz Magill, has since tendered her resignation letter. Another scandal has erupted over Harvard president Claudine Gay, as it has emerged that she has quoted other scholars without citation (also known as plagiarism) throughout her career.

The scandal has been a PR fiasco worthy of study at Harvard Business School. And it is a sign that the Ivies are losing their prestige. But the reasons are complicated and belie any simple analysis.

In short, over the course of a few short decades, the universities presided over by these presidents have undergone a transformation in moral culture. At one time, they recognised everyone’s equal human dignity and held the principle of free speech as sacrosanct. However, they have now shifted towards elevating victimhood as the highest virtue while encouraging hypersensitivity to perceived injustice.

According to sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, victimhood culture – colloquially known as “wokeness” – emerged from America’s Ivies first before spreading outwards into mainstream society.

Like a poison apple, victimhood culture looks perfectly fine from the outside, encased in euphemisms such as “diversity”, “equity” and “inclusion”. But it has a toxic core.

Its toxicity emerges when people are encouraged to see themselves as perpetual victims, and are rewarded for nurturing and prosecuting endless grievances. It was on these campuses that this ideology first spread (among some of the most privileged people in the world) and it was there that its maxims were first put into practice. Protected groups were given special status through affirmative action and other forms of positive discrimination, and students in the humanities were taught to weigh “lived experience” over objective truth.

As these ideas took hold, they manifested in tangible ways within university settings. It has culminated in the past decade in the widespread use of trigger warnings, safe spaces and microaggressions. Young adults came to behave like divas at luxury resorts, rather than students expected to study and learn. This poisonous culture seeped out into the rest of the world. Into media, corporations and Silicon Valley, and spreading all the way to Australia’s shores.

But this is where it gets complicated. Slogans such as “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are protected by the First Amendment – even though they are threatening to many people. And in an ideal world, universities should be trying to adhere to the First Amendment. Freedom of expression is a foundational principle of the university.

Nevertheless, universities must grapple with the fine line between protected speech and incitement to violence. Do such chants as “From the river to the sea” cross the line? Reasonable people may disagree. What is not OK is the physical intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students around the world since October 7. Students have been punched and spat on. And students around the world, including in Australia, report feeling scared.

It’s worth engaging in a thought experiment here. If neo-Nazis marched through Harvard under banners with swastikas emblazoned chanting “Heil Hitler”, would the president of Harvard remind us that such chants need to be understood in “context”? Would she defend the free speech of neo-Nazis’? A genuine commitment to the First Amendment would require it. In reality, neo-Nazis would more likely be escorted off campus by security or police.

The problem is that the culture that created the concept of “microaggression” is now blind to very real macroaggressions against students attending its institutions.

But it’s a complex moral conundrum, because victimhood culture should be repudiated. It is a road to nowhere except grievance and conflict.

And, despite the very real instances of intimidation and assault, it would be a mistake for Jewish students to adopt a hypersensitive approach that interprets ambiguous messages as hostility.

Balancing the rejection of victimhood culture with fair treatment for Jewish students is not easy. A responsible administration would ensure all students are free from intimidation and the threat of physical and verbal attacks, while reminding students that they should expect to be made to feel uncomfortable in the classroom. The job of colleges is to keep students physically safe, while challenging them intellectually.

At the same time, however, it is only natural for beleaguered Jewish students to want to be treated fairly. Other student groups at colleges have successfully had statues removed, buildings renamed, academic events cancelled and speakers deplatformed, because of distant connections to slavery that they find offensive. Is it too much to ask people to stop chanting genocidal slogans in the days and weeks after a genocidal terrorist attack?

Such demands for fairness raise important questions about the treatment of different groups on campuses. If universities had consistently upheld the principles of free speech over the past two decades, scholars who investigate controversial questions related to sex and race differences would not have faced marginalisation.

Conservatives and pro-life advocates would have the freedom to host seminars for students, and feminists who argue that men cannot become women would not face deplatforming. Many other speakers whose views may be considered offensive to “woke” sensibilities would also be welcomed on campus. However, this hasn’t been the case, and universities are only now realising the importance of free speech when they find themselves in need of it.

The Ivies’ current dilemma is a consequence of their own making. They want to reject victimhood culture in this particular instance where they have failed a minority group that has legitimate grievances. However, to do so, they are appealing to principles that they abandoned long ago. In 2023, Harvard received the worst-ever free speech ranking for an American college (as judged by FIRE, an American legal non-profit).

The Ivies need to understand the principle of free speech is not one that can be applied selectively. It applies to everyone, or it does not apply at all.

'Empty shelves with absolutely no books': Students, parents question school board's library weeding process | CBC News

Several Peel District School Board students, parents and community members are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new bo

CBC

Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Those are all examples of books Reina Takata says she can no longer find in her public high school library in Mississauga, Ont., which she visits on her lunch hour most days.

In May, Takata says the shelves at Erindale Secondary School were full of books, but she noticed that they had gradually started to disappear. When she returned to school this fall, things were more stark.

"This year, I came into my school library and there are rows and rows of empty shelves with absolutely no books," said Takata, who started Grade 10 last week. 

She estimates more than 50 per cent of her school's library books are gone. 

In the spring, Takata says students were told by staff that "if the shelves look emptier right now it's because we have to remove all books [published] prior to 2008." 

Takata is one of several Peel District School Board (PDSB) students, parents and community members CBC Toronto spoke to who are concerned about a seemingly inconsistent approach to a new equity-based book weeding process implemented by the board last spring in response to a provincial directive from the Minister of Education. 

They say the new process, intended to ensure library books are inclusive, appears to have led some schools to remove thousands of books solely because they were published in 2008 or earlier.

Parents and students are looking for answers as to why this happened, and what the board plans to do moving forward.

Prior to publication, neither Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce's office, nor the Education Ministry, would comment on PDSB's implementation of Lecce's directive when contacted by CBC Toronto.

But in a statement Wednesday, the education minister said he has written to the board to immediately end this practice. 

"Ontario is committed to ensuring that the addition of new books better reflects the rich diversity of our communities," said Lecce. 

"It is offensive, illogical and counterintuitive to remove books from years past that educate students on Canada's history, antisemitism or celebrated literary classics."

Weeding books by publication date raises concerns

The process of weeding books from a library isn't new.

Libraries across the country follow weeding plans to dispose of damaged, mouldy and outdated books and to ensure their collections remain a trusted source of current information.

But Takata, who is of Japanese descent, is concerned weeding by publication date doesn't follow that norm and will erase important history.

"I think that authors who wrote about Japanese internment camps are going to be erased and the entire events that went on historically for Japanese Canadians are going to be removed," she said.  

"That worries me a lot."

Libraries not Landfills, a group of parents, retired teachers and community members says it supports standard weeding, but shares Takata's concerns about both fiction and nonfiction books being removed based solely on their publication date.

The group is also concerned about how subjective criteria like inclusivity will be interpreted from school to school in the later stages of the equity-based weeding process.

Tom Ellard, a PDSB parent and the founder of Libraries not Landfills, said teachers reached out to them to help raise awareness about the weeding process.

"Who's the arbiter of what's the right material to go in the library, and who's the arbiter of what's wrong in our libraries? That's unclear," he said. "It's not clear to the teachers who've provided us this material, and it's not clear to me as a parent or as a taxpayer."

Ellard says he's talked to the parent council, his son's principal and his school board trustee. He's also contacted members of the provincial government, but says he hasn't received a substantial response about what happened in the spring and how the process is intended to work.

School board defends process

CBC Toronto requested an interview with the PDSB to discuss how the weeding process works and how the board plans to proceed in the wake of concerns from parents and students. A spokesperson said staff were not available to speak as they were "focusing on students and school families this week." 

The board did not address questions about empty shelves, the volume of books removed and reports about weeding books based on the date of publication.

Instead, the board issued statements explaining that the process of weeding books from school libraries was completed in June and has always been a part of teacher librarian responsibilities within PDSB and at school boards across the country.

"Books published prior to 2008 that are damaged, inaccurate, or do not have strong circulation data (are not being checked out by students) are removed," said the board in its statement. 

If damaged books have strong circulation the board says they can be replaced regardless of publication date, and older titles can stay in the collection if they are "accurate, serve the curriculum, align with board initiatives and are responsive to student interest and engagement."

"The Peel District School Board works to ensure that the books available in our school libraries are culturally responsive, relevant, inclusive, and reflective of the diversity of our school communities and the broader society," said the board.

Weeding a response to minister's directive

CBC Toronto reviewed a copy of the internal PDSB documents Ellard's group obtained, which includes frequently asked questions and answers provided to school staff by the board, and a more detailed manual for the process titled "Weeding and Audit of Resource in the Library Learning Commons collection."

The documents lay out an "equitable curation cycle" for weeding, which it says was created to support Directive 18 from the Minister of Education based on a 2020 Ministry review and report on widespread issues of systematic discrimination within the PDSB. 

Directive 18 instructs the board to complete a diversity audit of schools, which includes libraries.

"The Board shall evaluate books, media and all other resources currently in use for teaching and learning English, History and Social Sciences for the purpose of utilizing resources that are inclusive and culturally responsive, relevant and reflective of students, and the Board's broader school communities," reads the directive.

How weeding works

PDSB's "equitable curation cycle" is described generally in the board document as "a three-step process that holds Peel staff accountable for being critically conscious of how systems operate, so that we can dismantle inequities and foster practices that are culturally responsive and relevant."

First, teacher librarians were instructed to focus on reviewing books that were published 15 or more years ago — so in 2008 or earlier.

Then, librarians were to go through each of those books and consider the widely-used "MUSTIE'' acronym adapted from Canadian School Libraries. The letters stand for the criteria librarians are supposed to consider, and they include:

• Misleading – information may be factually inaccurate or obsolete. • Unpleasant – refers to the physical condition of the book, may require replacement. • Superseded – book been overtaken by a new edition or a more current resource. • Trivial – of no discernible literary or scientific merit; poorly written or presented. • Irrelevant – doesn't meet the needs and interests of the library's community. • Elsewhere – the book or the material in it may be better obtained from other sources.

The deadline to complete this step was the end of June, according to the document. 

Step two of curation is an anti-racist and inclusive audit, where quality is defined by "resources that promote anti-racism, cultural responsiveness and inclusivity." And step three is a representation audit of how books and other resources reflect student diversity.

When it comes to disposing of the books that are weeded, the board documents say the resources are "causing harm," either as a health hazard because of the condition of the book or because "they are not inclusive, culturally responsive, relevant or accurate."

For those reasons, the documents say the books cannot be donated, as "they are not suitable for any learners." 

A PDSB spokesperson said the board supports its schools "in the disposal of books in a responsible manner by following Peel Region's recycling guidelines." Peel Region allows for the recycling of book paper, as long as hard covers and any other plastics are removed first and put in the garbage. 

Books removed based on date, board heard

It was during the first stage of the new equitable curation cycle, that Takata, Libraries not Landfills, and at least one trustee, say some schools were removing books strictly based on publication date.

CBC Toronto recently reviewed a recording of a May 8 board committee meeting focused on the new equitable weeding process. In it, trustee Karla Bailey noted "there are so many empty shelves," when she walks into schools. 

"When you talk to the librarian in the library, the books are being weeded by the date, no other criteria," Bailey told the committee. 

"That is where many of us have a real issue. None of us have an issue with removing books that are musty, torn, or racist, outdated. But by weeding a book, removing a book from a shelf, based simply on this date is unacceptable. And yes, I witnessed it."

Bernadette Smith, superintendent of innovation and research for PDSB, is heard responding on the recording, saying it was "very disappointing" to hear that, because she said that's not the direction the board is giving in its training for the process.

Dianne Lawson, another member of Libraries not Landfills, told CBC Toronto weeding by publication date in some schools must have occurred in order to explain why a middle school teacher told her The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank was removed from shelves. She also says a kindergarten teacher told her The Very Hungry Caterpillar had been removed as well.

"She has read it to her classes for years, they love it," Lawson said, referring to the Eric Carle picture book. 

"I can't find any sedition in it, or any reason why you would pull this book."

Process 'rolled out wrong,' trustee chair says

Trustee and chair of the board, David Green, told CBC Toronto the weeding process itself "rolled out wrong." 

That's why he says trustees briefly paused the process until the board could get a better understanding of what was actually going on. 

A motion was passed at a May 24 board meeting to ensure that, going forward, those weeding books during the anti-racist and inclusive audit in the second phase of the curation cycle would need to document the title and reason for removal before any books were disposed of.

"We have to make sure that we are meeting the needs of the students and not just rolling something out because we were told to do it," said Green. 

When it comes to removing all books published in 2008 or earlier, Green said the board of trustees has heard that, too. 

"We have asked the Director [of Education] again to make sure that if that is taking place, then that is stopped, and then the proper process is followed," he said.

Green also said they have plans to communicate with parents about the weeding process.

In the meantime, students like Takata are left with half-empty shelves and questions about why they weren't consulted about their own libraries. 

"No one asked for our opinions," she said. "I feel that taking away books without anyone's knowledge is considered censorship."

This is Trofim Lysenko.

Following Stalin’s failed efforts to collectivize agricultural production, causing between 7 and 14 million people to starve to death, the geneticist Lysenko claimed he had the answers to mass produce crops to make it work. Lysenko threw out the established science of the West, dismissing it because it allowed too much of a role to individual actors, contrary to the focus of Communist ideology.

Lysenko told Soviet leadership exactly what they wanted to hear; and as a former peasant and member of the Communist Party, he was exactly who they wanted to hear it from. After gaining the personal support of Stalin, scientists critical of Lysenko were purged and imprisoned as Lysenkoism became state-sanctioned doctrine.

But no matter how much the Soviets wanted Lysenko’s pseudoscience to be true, it wasn​​’t. Famines caused by instituting Lysenko’s theories killed tens-of-millions of people across the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

Ideology twisting scholarship with dangerous consequences is a phenomenon hardly limited to the Soviet Union, it’s happening here, right now, in America in an effort to spread an intolerant orthodoxy masquerading as “antiracism.”

Take the orthodoxy that microaggressions are a grinding problem for black Americans, exerting significant psychological damage upon us.

Nevermind that the academic “literature” undergirding microaggressions is full of holes. It’s based on tiny sample sizes, is never replicated, It ignores the legions of black people surveyed who deny that acts labeled as microaggressions actually bother them, and it doesn’t show that supposed microaggressions correlate with racist sentiment of any kind.

Or take the orthodoxy that every workplace needs a diversity, equity, and inclusion program that teaches people to be more aware of racial differences. Nevermind that scientific surveys show such programs neither further diversify the workplace nor foster interethnic harmony, and in fact, if anything, increase interethnic conflict.

And the “implicit bias” testing often used to justify such programs, which purports to measure people’s subconscious racism, has been demonstrated by psychologists to have low reliability and weak predictors of real world discrimination.

And there’s the orthodoxy that all discrepancies between the races must be because of “systemic racism.” This idea with only the vaguest notion of what a “system” even is is presented as if it were “science”, but it’s quite simply anti-science. It flies in the face of how hard people work to master fields like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history to explain discrepancies in more nuanced ways.

Of course, believers in the intolerant orthodoxy are not exerting the degree of physical violence and assassinations that Stalinists exerted to enforce Lysenkoism. My comparison is of the relevant frames of mind. However, the intolerant orthodoxy is indeed doing great harm to our society.

If we want to heal the racial divisions in our nation, we need real science and scholarship not twisted by ideology. The Soviets couldn’t feed their people simply by wanting Lysenkoism to be true, and their rigid ideology and purging of opponents prevented them from finding answers that didn’t cause more harm than good.

Believing that being more race conscious in all aspects of our lives can cure our ills won’t make it so. But if we’re willing to open our mind beyond the ideas that are presently popular, we might just be able to find what will.

I’m John McWhorter. For more, read my book “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America,” and join me at FairForAll.org.

UC Berkeley off-campus house bans white guests from common areas

An off-campus co-op for students at University of California, Berkeley called the Person of Color Theme House has reportedly banned white guests from entering common areas of the house.

www.dailymail.co.uk|Joseph Michalitsianos

• The accommodation houses University of California, Berkeley students and has rules that specifically ban 'white people' from common spaces in the house
• The Person of Color Theme House says many of it's members moved to the house to avoid 'white violence'
• It also calls for members to avoid bringing 'parents/family members that express bigotry'
• Several people, including POC, have complained of a ferocious culture in the house that seeks to exclude and belittle
• The accommodation, which is located close to Berkeley's campus, is a five-story, 30-room home that can house up to 56 students

An off-campus co-op for students at the University of California, Berkeley named the 'Person of Color Theme House' has banned white guests from entering common areas of the house.

A list of house rules revealed that occupants were told 'many POC moved here to be able to avoid white violence and presence, so respect their decision of avoidance if you bring white guests.'

While the student house aims to have an 'inclusive' environment, the rules specifically state 'white guests are not allowed in common spaces,' according to the list, which was posted on Reddit.  

The accommodation, which is located close to Berkeley's campus, is a five-story, 30-room home that can house up to 56 students. The house is owned by a private landlord.

But the 'rules' which were leaked on social media have caused outrage - with many people slamming the restrictions as 'racist' as others came forward and revealed their experience living in the co-op.  

One mixed-race Reddit user, who claimed to have lived at the house, said that their 'presence as a light skinned person was not received well.'

They said house members called them slurs and they were even 'not allowed to let my dad enter the house because he's white.'

The house was set up as part of the Berkeley Student Cooperative, a program designed to bring affordable housing to students in California's Bay-area, and 'aims to provide housing to low-income, first generation, immigrant and marginalized students of color.'

According to the 'rules,' people that live there should 'avoid bringing parents/family members that express bigotry,' because 'Queer, Black, and Indigenous members should not have to avoid common spaces because of homophobic or racist parents/family members.'

Janet Gilmore, Senior Director of Strategic Communications at the University told DailyMail.com the house is 'not campus operated,' meaning 'it is not the role of the campus to comment.'

Gilmore also said the University does have it's own Theme Programs, but they have 'no such policies like the one alleged in the Reddit image,' and stated 'Cal Housing Theme Programs do not discriminate on the basis of race, consistent with UC and campus policy.'

'As this involves an off-campus non-affiliated landlord, the campus has no ability under the Code of Student Conduct to discipline the landlord.'

Under BSC's antidiscrimination policy, 'acts are prohibited if they discriminate against any BSC community members' on the basis of qualities such as age, gender and sexual orientation.

Stephen Ross, cooperative experience manager for the Berkeley Student Cooperative, told The Fix that the house's rules are not 'official policy.'

'White people can and do live in POC house, but the focus for POC house is providing a safe and supportive living environment for people of color,' said Ross.

But Ross also said the Person of Color Theme House has it's 'own culture and practices,' and the focus of the house is to provide 'a safe and supportive living environment for people of color.'

He said house members purposefully work towards 'not making Whiteness central to the experience for members living in the house,' because some members have been traumatized by the 'white violence' mentioned in the rules.

Ross defines this as being negatively impacted by things such as 'racist and discriminatory remarks made by former President Trump' and 'daily experiences of covert and overt racism.'

He added he hopes the house can provide members with a 'safe space' where they can 'process their experiences and feel supported.'

Houses in the Berkeley Student Cooperative are run by private landlords, meaning the University often feels they don't need to comment on what they do.

This comes just weeks after public schools and a teachers union in Minnesota agreed that white teachers in the education system would be laid off before those of color.

The deal was struck between Minneapolis Public Schools and the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers union after a two week strike spearheaded by union president Greta Callahan last spring.

It states that instead of teacher layoffs or relocations being decided based on seniority – as is typical – schools can ignore that protocol and dismiss senior staff members if otherwise a teacher of color would be laid off.

Former Republican candidate Kendall Qualls called the deal 'repugnant' and  characterizing it as 'unamerican.'

'It's just repugnant,' Qualls, who is black, said.

'You it you think about the discrimination that we faced in this country back in the 50's and 60's, it was wrong then. It's wrong now regardless of who is the victim it's wrong. And we shouldn't stand for it as a country.'

Many have called the deal unconstitutional, and accused it of addressing past racism with more racism.

The Dubious Science of Microaggressions

Putting the "Micro" in Microaggressions

unsafescience.substack.com|Lee Jussim

If one were to read much of the psychological literature on microaggressions uncritically, one would come away with the conclusion that they are a serious problem. For example, prominent microaggression advocate MonnicaWilliams recently declared, “Data from academic institutions and the general public highly suggests that microaggressions are common.” Such a claim is common. But a closer look at the evidence on which such claims are made paints a different picture.

A microaggression is some sort of subtle racial insult, plausibly deniable as not racist.  But people are treated badly all the time.  The day I wrote this, I had to wait for a ridiculous amount of time to pay $13 for a small, desiccated hamburger at an airport.

Interestingly, this is exactly the type of incident that Sue et al (2007, p. 275) highlighted as an example of a microaggression: "When a Latino couple is given poor service at a restaurant..."  Nadal (2011) used this item to assess people's experiences with microaggressions: "I received substandard service in stores compared to customers of other racial groups."  

As per Nadal (2011), if I believed customers of other races were given better service, I should consider this a microaggression. Nonetheless, I am pretty sure my long wait for a bad burger was not a microaggression. And I am pretty sure it would not have been a microaggression if the burger shop provided the same overpriced, undersized, desiccated burger to a person of color (POC), notwithstanding Sue et al's analysis or Nadal's implication that if I attributed it to race it would be a microaggression.

When Is Bad Treatment a Microaggression?

What makes some sort of bad treatment a microaggression versus just another form of people treating each other badly sometimes? Racism (or some other form of bigotry). The treatment needs to be motivated by, express, and reinforce racism. Long waits for bad burgers could be a microaggression—if, say, the burger joint made POC wait longer to order. But if everyone has a long wait for bad overpriced burgers, there is no racism involved, so no microaggression.

But how can one tell whether any particular insult or mean-spirited act or statement is a microaggression or just a person acting badly that has nothing to do with race (or any other identity)? One definition of microaggressions (Sue et al., 2007) is “…brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color.” Did they literally mean “daily,” or is it just a figure of speech? Sue et al. (2008, p. 278) clarify: minorities don’t “just occasionally experience racial microaggressions.” Rather, “they are a constant, continuing, and cumulative experience” in their lives. They are, supposedly, disturbingly common racial slights.

Another more recent definition is that these are “…deniable acts of racism that reinforce pathological stereotypes and inequitable social norms” (Williams, 2020).  

As a political statement, this is fine. In politics, anything one says to advance one’s agenda is fair game. As Sarah Haider has recently pointed out, it is almost impossible for activist goals to square with truthseeking goals, because flagrant disregard for facts, truth, and evidence is often useful for advancing activist goals

But Williams’ (2020) statement was published in a scientific psychology journal. As a scientific statement, its a douzy.  It states that microaggressions are racist, but deniable as not racist. They have clear causal effects—reinforcing pathological stereotypes and inequitable social norms. This would seem to require researchers to do the following:

1. Establish that an insult/slight is motivated by racism.
2. Identify stereotypes that the insult/slight reinforces.
3. Empirically establish the “pathology” of the stereotype.  Many stereotypes are simply accurate – on average, men are taller than women, Asian Americans have higher academic achievement than other groups, liberals are more likely to support abortion rights than are conservatives.  Even wrong stereotypes are not necessarily pathological – one survey found that most liberals' believe that the police kill at least 100 unarmed Black people per year and almost 40% believe the number is 1000 or more (the real number in recent years is about 20, depending on how one counts and the year).  This level of inaccuracy may be colloquially describable as “nuts” but it is not “pathological” in any serious psychological sense.  So if not all stereotypes are pathological, one cannotpresume pathology in any particular stereotype; it requires evidence.
4. Show that the microaggression actually strengthens those particular pathological stereotypes.
5. Identify relevant inequitable social norms.
6. Show that the microaggression reinforces those norms.

Given that all of this is in Williams’s definition of microaggressions, to take this seriously scientifically, one would expect all of this to be empirically established for a particular slight before it would be labeled a microaggression.

Instead, the reverse occurs—some act is labeled a “microaggression” by one or more scholars, then all of the ills attributed to microaggressions are presumed rather than demonstrated. Then the act is triumphantly paraded as scientific evidence of a microaggression.

The academic legerdemain by which the ills of microaggressions are implicitly imported or declared by fiat rather than actually empirically demonstrated has been exposed in each of the following articles (titles shown; all fully referenced at the end):

• Macrononsense in Multiculturalism
• Microaggressions: Strong Claims and Inadequate Evidence
• Microaggressions, Questionable Science, and Free Speech

For example, Lilienfeld (2017) concluded that there is insufficient evidence to support any of these major claims by microaggression advocates:

1. They are operationalized with sufficient clarity and consensus to afford rigorous scientific investigation.
2. They are interpreted negatively by most or all minority group members.
3. They reflect implicitly prejudicial and implicitly aggressive motives.
4. They can be validly assessed using only respondents’ subjective reports.
5. They exert an adverse impact on recipients’ mental health.

The "Best" Studies

Some of the “best” studies often held up by microaggression advocates as establishing the validity of these main claims fail to do so.  For example, in defending the microaggression concept in light of Lilienfeld’s critique, Williams (2020, p. 12) invoked a study by Kanter et al. (2017): it provides “important empirical support for something that diversity researchers knew all along—microaggressive acts are rooted in racist beliefs...” This was a small-scale study, including only 33 Black and 118 white students, all from a single university. These numbers are so small and so unrepresentative of any population that the entire study should be viewed as little more than question-raising, regardless of other limitations, of which there are many, as we elucidated in Cantu and Jussim (2022).

Williams (2020, p. 13) also extolled “Another important measure of microaggression frequency—the Racial and Ethnic Microaggressions Scale (Nadal, 2011), which was validated with a large sample of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and multiracial participants.” Whether anyone should take Nadal’s scale seriously, given its numerous limitations, is, however, another issue. For example. consider the item “someone avoided walking near me on the street because of my race.” This requires mindreading. Ever since Bem’s ESP article helped trigger psychology’s replication crisis, mindreading has been widely recognized as impossible.

However, one does not need to criticize the methods to understand how damaging Nadal’s study was for claims extolling the frequency with which POC experience microaggressions. Respondents were provided with supposed examples of microaggressions and were then asked how frequently they had experienced such discrimination in the prior six months. For a vast majority of the items, most respondents reported that they either had not experienced the supposed microaggression in the past six months at all or, if they had, did so one to three times. In light of this result, it’s difficult to characterize microaggressions as constituting a major social ailment. And that comes from taking his results at face value, which is probably not warranted.

Perhaps because we (Cantu and Jussim, 2022) highlighted the strange state of affairs whereby an article extolled as testifying to the importance of microaggressions actually found just the opposite, Williams recently highlighted a study (Anderson et al., 2022) as demonstrating that microaggressions are experienced very frequently by medical students. That is indeed what the authors claimed to have found: “Our first major finding was that medical students frequently experience microaggressions.” (p. 303).

Unfortunately, the authors’ claims notwithstanding, they did not assess “microaggressions.” They assessed variations on “How often do you think has someone been mean to you?” Here are just two items:

People trivialize my ideas in classroom discussions.

I am made to feel unwelcome in a group.

There is nothing about race or racism here (or in their other questions). These types of experiences have probably happened to everyone. To be sure, though, I have no doubt that people are subject to subtle insults, and that sometimes, these are racially motivated. But if one wishes to know "how often?" one cannot possibly obtain much of an answer from even the supposedly best published psychological science on the topic.

And that, gentle reader, is how peer-reviewed social science creates myths (much as it has about stereotype threat and implicit bias) about the power of problems that it has not actually established to exist to any substantial degree.

-

[References]

Look Who’s Talking About Educational Equity

In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, college presidents scrambled to issue condemnations of racism, police brutality, and white su

Quillette

In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, college presidents scrambled to issue condemnations of racism, police brutality, and white supremacy. They often buttressed those condemnations with promises to expand their institution’s administrative bureaucracy. For instance, among other things, the University of Kentucky will institute cultural proficiency and diversity training for faculty and students, and install “diversity and inclusion officers” within each of its 17 colleges. Out west, the University of the Redlands issued an 18-point plan, including an “Activist Residence” program, racial climate surveys, anti-racism workshops, racial healing workshops, and enhanced hiring procedures and performance evaluations that will monitor contributions to “diversity and inclusion.” Similar plans are afoot in colleges across the nation. However well intentioned, these programs will likely increase inequities rather than reduce them, and push the nation’s colleges still closer to the low level of its public schools. The reason? As I have explained before, most of the college administrators who work in offices promoting “Diversity and Inclusion” and “Equity and Social Justice” and the like have been credentialed by the same dysfunctional institutions that have monopolized the training and licensure of K-12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) teachers, principals, and superintendents for 50 years—education schools. A century ago, Harvard president Lawrence Lowell described the university’s education school as “a kitten that ought to be drowned,” and in the decades since, successive studies have reached the same conclusion: Most of our training schools for K-12 teachers lack rigorous standards for admission, graduation, and research—but they’re filled to the brim with ideology. Worse still are ed school programs in leadership, from which most student-facing college administrators now take their degrees. As early as 1987, when the focus of these programs was almost entirely on K-12 administrators, the National Commission on Excellence in Educational Administration recommended closing more than 300 of the nation’s 500 educational-leadership programs due to lackluster academic standards and professional irrelevance. Because these programs raked in tuition dollars, however, that advice was ignored. Two decades later, a study undertaken by former Teachers College President Arthur Levine discovered that the number of leadership programs had actually increased by 20 percent. Their quality had not. “Inadequate to appalling” is how Levine rated the majority of programs in leadership and administration in 2005, and he highlighted economic incentives that were creating “an army of unmotivated students seeking to acquire credits in the easiest way possible.” Education schools met that demand with new doctoral programs that were “little more than graduate credit dispensers.” This race to the bottom has only accelerated with the proliferation of degree programs for college administrators. A study from 2016 reveals that in the brief period between 2011 and 2014, directors of programs in higher education administration tended to reduce research and credit-hour requirements, remove program enrollment caps, and move more coursework online. So-called “executive” doctoral programs in higher education are the newest development, with classes taking place in monthly weekend meetings, in online modules, or in some combination of the two.

Remarkably, the less there is to distinguish ed schools from diploma mills, the more power their graduates have been wielding on college campuses—and not just over students. In the fall of 2018 San Diego State took the inevitable next step by creating several faculty positions in “Diversity and Inclusion” and “Equity in Education,” positions which will report to the ed-school-trained Associate Vice President for Faculty Diversity and Inclusion. More recently, ed schools at North Carolina State and University of Colorado at Denver launched, respectively, PhD and doctoral programs in “educational equity,” just in time to meet a rising demand.

It would be one thing if ed schools had demonstrable expertise in achieving the laudable goal of educational equity. Ideological bias and even low academic standards might be a price worth paying if the institutions had a record of helping low-income and minority students close the learning gap that exists between themselves and their more advantaged peers. But they have no such record—just the opposite in fact.

Their longstanding opposition to coherent, grade-by-grade, knowledge-based curricula, for example, is one of the reasons why colleges and universities have had to spend seven billion dollars a year on remedial courses in an attempt to get 40 percent of first-year college students ready for college-level work. For more than half a century, most ed schools have been in thrall to “constructivist” and “child-centered” theories of learning which stigmatize content-specific curricula as being intellectually stultifying and politically repressive. So it’s no surprise to learn that a recent call to “defund math and STEM” is issued from a professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Illinois College of Education. As fashionably radical as it may sound, the defunding proposal is just the latest variation on a century-old set of bad ideas, ideas which have contributed significantly to a situation in which “America’s high-school graduates,” to quote an NPR headline, “look like other countries’ high school dropouts.”

The record of ed schools on the pedagogy of reading instruction is nothing less than a national catastrophe. Despite more than half a century’s worth of scientific evidence showing that systematic instruction in phonics is, for most beginning readers, the royal road to literacy, the latest report from the National Organization for Teacher Quality found that only one-third of graduate ed school programs surveyed give aspiring teachers adequate instruction in the science of reading pedagogy. Many schools neglect this science in deference to an antiquated “progressive” orthodoxy which insists that phonics instruction is unnatural, and that “student-centered” teaching will minister to the “whole child” with “whole words” and “whole language.” In the second of two audio documentaries on the decades-old debacle, “At a Loss for Words,” American Public Media’s Emily Hanford asked Ken Goodman, a central figure in this movement, about the overwhelming scientific evidence that contradicts this theory. “My science is different,” he replied.

The students who suffer most from this rejection of science are the very ones whose interests education schools have long claimed to be serving: black, Latino, and low-income students, whose disproportionate rates of delinquency, poverty, and incarceration correlate with disproportionately high rates of illiteracy. It’s these same students who also lose the most in a content-poor, skills-based curriculum. As ED Hirsch showed in Why Knowledge Matters, when students from poor backgrounds aren’t given the content knowledge that their more advantaged peers pick up at home, they’re often further behind them when they finish school than when they started.

Fortunately, there are schools where educational equity and social justice are matters of record, not rhetoric—where low-income and minority students not only match but often surpass the performance of their more advantaged peers. Their teachers and principals manage this feat, however, not because of their ed school training but often in spite of it. More than a decade ago, education writer Karin Chenoweth profiled 16 such “unexpected” public schools in her 2007 book It’s Being Done. Though the schools vary in size, quality of facilities, and geographical location, one thing the teachers and principals in these schools share is the recognition that new teachers will have to be trained “more or less from scratch” since “university education programs do not even begin to prepare teachers for teaching.”

Another thing they share is a commitment to coherently organized, content-rich curricula—a commitment that’s central to New York City’s highest-achieving charter schools as well. Jeffrey Litt has been focusing on sequentially structured curricular content as long as any educator in the nation—beginning in 1992 with PS67 (Mohegan elementary), and then in 2001 as the founding principal of Icahn Charter Schools, whose seven schools in the south Bronx he superintends. Mr. Litt’s longstanding rejection of the skills-centered, anti-curriculum orthodoxy is central to his success in not only narrowing, but often closing the achievement gap. South Bronx parents have been voting with their feet in his favor: there’s always a waiting list of thousands of students—more than 90 percent of whom are black and Hispanic—trying to get out of New York’s traditional public schools and into the Icahn schools.

There is, then, no small irony in the fact that the very institutions whose putatively “progressive” agenda has for 50 years militated against coherent K-12 curricula, ignored the science of reading instruction, and thus hobbled generations of disadvantaged students, have been sending their graduates to “reform” what has been the one bright spot in the American educational system, its colleges and universities. There, from administrative offices in “Equity and Inclusion” or “Diversity and Social Justice,” they promote the view that it’s really faculty “microaggressions,” or their “implicit bias” and lack of “cultural awareness” which are the real obstacles to educational equity. It’s an expensive bureaucratic ruse.

The 2019 National Report on Educational Progress reveals shockingly low levels of subject proficiency among high school seniors: only 37 percent are proficient in reading, 27 percent in writing, 25 percent in math, and 12 percent in American history. College professors have experienced these deficits first hand for decades. They know how ill-prepared most first-year students are for college-level work, and they know too that it’s the lack of content knowledge, not its possession, that’s genuinely repressive.

But college faculty will accede to the latest round of “equity” programming, whether out of ideological sympathy, intimidation, or indifference. Whatever the motives, the educational costs of their acquiescence will be borne by the same group of disadvantaged students who have born it for 60 years in the nation’s K-12 public schools. There’s nothing equitable about that.

How Ed Schools Became a Menace to Higher Education

quillette.com

Microaggressive acts can usually be explained away by seemingly nonbiased and valid reasons. For the recipient of a microaggression, however, there is always the nagging question of whether it really happened. … It is difficult to identify a microaggression, especially when other explanations seem plausible. Many people of color describe a vague feeling that they have been attacked, that they have been disrespected, or that something is not right. … In some respects, people of color may find an overt and obvious racist act easier to handle than microaggressions that seem vague or disguised. … The above incident [an account of a disagreement between the lead author and a white female flight attendant] reveals how microaggressions operate to create psychological dilemmas for both the White perpetrator and the person of color.

The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think.

Turning students into weapons | Arif Ahmed | The Critic Magazine

The control of free speech at universities is a first step on a path towards totalitarianism…

thecritic.co.uk

University authorities sometimes disinvite visiting speakers, and more frequently control what their own staff and students say, not (or not only) so as not to disturb the rest of us with new facts but also, or instead, to protect our feelings. For instance, in 2015, Warwick University Students’ Union took a decision to bar the well-known anti-Sharia activist Maryam Namazie because of the risk that she would say something “inflammatory” (though this was later reversed).

The Students’ Union later said, “The decision was made in deference to the right of Muslim students not to feel intimidated or discriminated against on their university campus rather than in the interests of suppressing free speech.”

The Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, defending its decision to rescind Jordan Peterson’s Visiting Fellowship there, wrote that “Robust debate can scarcely occur … when some members of the community are made to feel personally attacked, not for their ideas but for their very identity”.

Sheffield University announced it would employ 20 of its own students to help control “micro-aggressive” speech, by which it means “subtle but offensive comments” — which, in turn, means what the university thinks are racially offensive comments, such as “Stop making everything a race issue”, and “Where are you really from?”

All these measures compromise the values that universities ought to hold dearest, but describing them as ‘campus censorship’ doesn’t really get to the bottom of the issue. After all, both Maryam Namazie and Jordan Peterson state their views publicly in other forums. And Sheffield hasn’t said it will punish or actively prevent these supposed micro-aggressions, but only that it will attempt to create “healthy conversations”. Of course the phrase ‘healthy conversation’ in this context sounds about as reassuring as ‘public safety’ did in Paris c. 1794; but it may be well-intentioned; and on the whole the atmosphere in universities these days reminds you more of Huxley than of Orwell.

Is there a free speech argument against policies that are designed not to control our beliefs but to pacify our feelings? What people usually offer is the “Galileo defence”: that free speech is necessary for knowledge. Suppressing a truth stops people knowing it is true. Suppressing a falsehood stops them knowing why it is false. Suppressing discussion of any sort stops the discovery of new truths.

The Galileo defence is quite right as far as it goes. And it matters too: recent experience suggests that we as a society will suffer from ignorance of truths in psychology, sociology and elsewhere because the research that would uncover them is being suppressed.

But you needn’t look far to find control, coercion and bullying directed against speech, or art, that has nothing much to do with knowledge or truth. The intention, and probably in most cases the effect, of these dis-invitations and nudges away from the “inflammatory” or “micro-aggressive” was less to protect anyone from truths that might surprise them and more to preserve them from being upset.

Although it has only recently become widespread in British universities, controlling literary and other output on the grounds of corrosive or inflammatory effects is something that Mary Whitehouse, the Lord Chamberlain and others have been doing for decades.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover established literary merit as a defence against censorship for obscenity in 1960. Seventeen more years passed before the acquittal of Inside Linda Lovelace, a book that lacked the literary merit or at least the literary pretensions of Lawrence’s novel , but of which it could fairly be said (and was said by the Met at the time) that if it didn’t count as objectionably obscene, then no written material ever could.

In 1988, the Local Government Act banned Local Education Authorities from using material that taught “the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. And in 2019, police charged two famous drill rappers, Skengdo and AM, for playing their own music, because of its supposed connection to gang violence (they got two years suspended).

One couldn’t really say the value of truth or knowledge outweighed whatever real or imaginary social harms the police, the anti-pornographers or Mrs Thatcher were trying to prevent. There is no important truth that suppressing Lady Chatterley’s Lover prevents anyone from knowing. That people sometimes have affairs with gamekeepers is (I suppose) something that anyone who cared could have guessed anyway; and we already knew that it is not a good idea to over-intellectualise everything, if only because Lawrence himself had been going on about that for years. The Galileo defence has limits.

A broader defence starts with a clearer view of freedom in general. People on the right often think of it as the absence of a physical impediment imposed by others — “The free man,” Helvetius wrote, “is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment … it is not lack of freedom not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale.”

But we can understand it more generally as the absence of control by another person or agency. You can control someone by thwarting his aims, wishes and desires — by imprisoning him, or putting a gun to his head. But another, better method is to control those aims, wishes and desires. Christopher Hitchens therefore defined the totalitarian as “the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes”.

To control somebody’s aims, wishes and desires, it may be enough to restrict their exposure to facts. But it may be necessary, and it typically is more effective, to restrict (I mean not necessarily to prohibit, just to make more costly) their exposure to values as expressed in literature, art and music, or in the “wrong” sorts of conversation, sitcom or fancy dress.

Only very specific kinds of speech and writing can transmit or preserve knowledge of the truth; but there is no limit to the kinds of speech, writing and other forms of expression that can shape people’s values and priorities, and therefore also the direction of their lives. To control the producers of culture high or low is therefore to control its consumers — that is, everyone.

That is why the suppression not of scientific but of artistic freedom constitutes a thread in totalitarian procedure running from Plato, via Islamic and Protestant fundamentalism, to the Khmer Rouge and the Soviet Union in modern times. It is also why the CIA during the Cold War aimed to distribute to Russians not just facts but fiction, most famously Doctor Zhivago. As Peter Finn and Petra Couvée write in The Zhivago Affair, the CIA found that doing so was an effective way to “influence attitudes and reinforce predispositions toward intellectual and cultural freedom, and dissatisfaction with its absence”.

It is not because they convey truths that Bend Sinister or The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists should be available to everyone, but because they express with unique power values that nobody has the right to prevent anyone from encountering.

It is not because they convey truths that it is wrong to suppress prejudices that belong for example in suburbia c.1970 or Islington c.2021; it is because in the act of controlling them, the state or university is partially and indirectly controlling everybody who would otherwise have heard them. The problem with censorship is not always the connection between freedom of speech and knowledge; it is the connection between freedom of speech and freedom of everything else.

You would have expected universities to be among the most important institutional barriers to the sort of control that I am contrasting with individual liberty. Universities exist to pursue facts, but also to interrogate values, including the most fundamental values of our society.

Indeed, it is the proudest boast of any decent society that it possesses institutions devoted to that end. You would have thought, therefore, that they would encourage exposure to the widest possible variety of opinion on social, political and philosophical matters.

And yet all too often our universities — or rather the government, the regulator, the managerial class that runs them and even the students’ unions themselves —behave as though their purpose is (a) to address real (and also I fear to whinge incessantly about imaginary) social problems that are better addressed elsewhere, if at all; and (b) to connive in the ongoing moral panic over “extremist” speech to which the current “Prevent” duty gives such clumsy and heavy-handed expression. The upshot is that many of the most intelligent people in the country, at the most formative stage of their lives, are being denied exposure to a whole range of radical thinkers, from Maryam Namazie to Norman Geras, the likes of which previous generations benefited immeasurably from being able to discuss.

Although it is not there yet, the situation in higher education threatens to develop into a sector-wide dereliction of duty. There are many valuable aims that duty does not include. Universities do not exist to make our society kinder, or more equal, or more inclusive.

They do not exist to make Christians or Jews, or atheists or Muslims feel their beliefs are being “respected”. They do not exist either to denigrate our past or to gild it; nor are they there to transmit any particular set of values. They exist to pursue truth and to question values.

And if they don’t hold fast to this aim, then there is another purpose to which they might readily be put. In December 2019 Fudan University in China removed the phrase “freedom of thought” from its charter in favour of a commitment to “weaponise the minds of teachers and students using Xi Jinping’s socialist ideology with characteristics of China in the new era”.

Clearly we are not close to that point right now; but the direction of travel is clear enough. So, too, is the size of the betrayal involved in bequeathing to the next generation educational institutions that “weaponise” the very minds that they were in fact supposed to liberate.

For much of history, human beings went to war over knowledge: my tribe and our beliefs vs. your tribe and its beliefs. So it makes sense that philosophers have long been preoccupied with the question of how to manage ideological conflict. Plato recommended rule by an enlightened authoritarian; Hobbes advocated a “leviathan”; Rousseau had a sunnier prescription: Governments should promote the “general will,” a society’s better instincts. (Who gets to define those instincts is another, thornier matter.) When all else failed, and it often did, there was violence. As Charles Sanders Peirce wrote in 1877: “When complete agreement could not otherwise be reached, a general massacre of all who have not thought in a certain way has proved a very effective means of settling opinion in a country.”

Gradually, a better way emerged, a liberal system for adjudicating differences of belief in a shared struggle to ascertain what’s true. That’s the story Jonathan Rauch tells in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge (Brookings Institution Press). He argues that the American founding was both a political and an epistemic revolution. Just as the U.S. Constitution created structures and rules to peacefully channel social conflict into social progress, the Constitution of Knowledge created a network of norms, rules, and institutions for turning disagreement into knowledge. Higher education sits at the center of that system.

Now that system, says Rauch, is under attack. Outrage and disinformation, alternative realities, enforced conformity, and ideological blacklisting have contributed to an epistemic crisis. It can sometimes feel as if we’re walking around in a daze debating first principles. How do we know what we know? How do we know it’s true?

Rauch spoke recently with The Chronicle Review about the intellectual climate on campuses, the extent to which professors are afraid of their own students, and why higher education is losing credibility with the public.

What role does higher education play within the Constitution of Knowledge?

There are four major pillars of the reality-based community, my label for the people, professionals, institutions, and organizations that work under the rules of the Constitution of Knowledge. The first is academia, science, and research; the second is journalism; the third is law; the fourth is government. Of the four, the academic world is first among equals. First, it’s at the forefront of actually doing knowledge work — figuring out what is and isn’t true. Second, it determines and refines the rules for figuring out what’s true and not true. Third, it transmits those values to subsequent generations. So higher education is at the heart of the whole system.

You are not yourself an academic, but you spend a lot of time on campuses and have long been an engaged observer of the academic scene. How would you characterize the intellectual climate today?

There is a huge amount of important and serious and honest work being done in American academia. We should not forget that. We sometimes talk as if universities are Maoist struggle sessions. They’re not. But there are a few interlocking problems that seem to be getting worse.

One of them is the lack of viewpoint diversity. When there are entire disciplines, certainly entire departments, where a student can go through training starting as an undergraduate, through graduate school, then on into her professional career, and maybe even through retirement, without ever encountering a political conservative — that is going to cause serious distortions because of the questions that won’t get asked and the prejudices that will be assumed. And it’s going to cause the public to believe that the enterprise of academia is not on the level.

So lack of diversity is problem one. It fuels a couple of other problems. One is chilling. Surveys, anecdotal evidence, and reporting find there are many students who are afraid of their fellow students, and professors who are afraid of their students, and sometimes of other professors. There are entire topics that scholars are effectively avoiding out of fear. That is the opposite of what a university is supposed to be. A university should practice and model open inquiry and intellectual fearlessness. Instead we have fearfulness — that someone will be hurt, someone will be offended, someone will protest, someone will demand an investigation.

There’s a further, related problem that also comes from lack of diversity, or is exacerbated by it: politicization. We’re seeing in a number of fields, especially in the humanities and social sciences, demands that the disciplines themselves take on particular political priorities. If there is one thing good science should not be, it’s politicized.

Much of what you describe as self-censorship might be described by others as civility. Where does civility end and self-censorship begin?

Civility — editing ourselves so we can get along with others — does not involve punishment. It does not inspire fear. It’s a different story if you think you’ll lose your job, be investigated, your friends will shun you, your professional connections will detach themselves, your journal will repudiate your work and apologize for publishing it, and you might not be hirable somewhere else. Those actions are not consistent with civility. Those actions are punitive in intent and intimidating in outcome, and that’s what they’re designed to be.

Most students do not want to drive conservatives from campus, and most professors do not want to discriminate against conservatives. So what’s going on?

It is a bit puzzling on its face. The More in Common study that was conducted a few years ago figured that the progressive, activist portion of the U.S. population is 8 percent. It’s a very small group, yet they dominate conversation on Twitter and in Democratic Party circles. On campus we see even more of the same thing.

We need to think about what Trump and MAGA are up to, and what cancel culture is up to, as two varieties of the same thing, which is information warfare. Or epistemic warfare. There are lots of ways to do that. The way we see increasingly used on campuses is social coercion: Find ways to make it very socially painful to be called out. It’s not like you’re safe if you don’t, say, criticize affirmative action. You never know where the land mines are. You never know what might be construed as a microaggression until someone denounces you for it. That’s on purpose, and has two effects. One is straightforward chilling. The second is more subtle: It distorts the information environment by spoofing consensus. In a chilled environment, you don’t know what people around you really think. It becomes easy to believe that you’re the only person with your point of view and that you’re isolated.

What you’re describing is how a dedicated illiberal minority can chill a liberal majority.

Yeah, and it’s important to separate the tactics from the ideology. Anyone can use these tactics. And everyone has. This is how it’s possible for fairly small vanguards of people to dominate their environments.

You argue that acting censoriously in the name of laudable goals like diversity and inclusion tends to be counterproductive. For one thing, norm-policing often backfires on the norm police. Moreover, censoriousness patronizes and imperils minorities. How so?

I’m married to a man today, miraculously, because of free speech, free inquiry, and the sovereignty of facts in the Constitution of Knowledge. When I was born, in 1960, it was illegal in most states to have sex with a person you loved. Gays were considered mentally ill by the psychiatric profession, subjected to shock therapy, sometimes lobotomized, denounced from the pulpits, assumed to be a threat to national security — I could go on. The only reason for gay progress was that we were able to organize and make counterarguments showing that the reasons for all that hate and fear did not exist.

To argue that minorities are so fragile that we’ll be traumatized if we’re exposed to contrary arguments, or even hate speech, is, first of all, ahistorical: We faced it down, and we won. Second, it’s patronizing. And third, it aids in our oppression. The excuse for second-class citizenship for gays, women, and Black people was always that they’re weak. Think about the slogans. Gay people: pansy, limp-wrist, sissy. Women: the gentler sex, not capable of surviving the rigors of the workplace or politics without feeling dismay or shock. And, above all, Blacks: childlike, unable to fend for themselves, need the protection of segregation and slavery. Minority-rights activists should be the last people on the planet to embrace the stereotype that minorities are weak and need protection.

Does a perception of higher ed as an engine of censoriousness — whether that characterization is fair or not — imperil the credibility of academic expertise?

Clearly, the credibility of higher education is taking a hit. I don’t have the polls in front of me, but I think it’s a 20-percentage-point drop in the past five years. A 20-percent change in anything over five years is very significant. Most of that is conservatives and Republicans. Diversity matters, and diversity of every kind matters. And if the public looks at academia and sees one type of person asking one type of question and adopting one type of worldview, they’re going to feel alienated from that. I can’t blame them.

Is there a risk that an emphasis on viewpoint diversity de-emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity?

They’re both important. What’s really going on here is that people want to assert that racial and ethnic diversity should supersede viewpoint diversity. I think it should be possible to have both. A lot of people want one without the other.

To be clear, I’m not arguing for quotas for conservative professors. You can’t do anything like that. But what you can do is affirmatively look for discrimination in hiring, in tenure decisions and peer review, and say we’re going to take political discrimination seriously from now on.

In your 1993 book, Kindly Inquisitors, and again in The Constitution of Knowledge, you detail two core rules for a reality-based debate. The “fallibilist rule": Something can be established as knowledge only if it’s, in principle, debunkable. And the empirical rule, which holds that the truth of a claim has nothing to do with the identity of the person making the claim. In other words, no one is epistemically privileged by dint of who they are. Kindly Inquisitors came out almost 30 years ago. In that time, have identity-based knowledge claims become more ascendant on college campuses?

It was already pretty significant in 1993. But in the early ’90s, standpoint epistemology was more heavily theorized. What I see today is more of a social phenomenon. It’s more about: I see myself as a person of such and such identity, and I’m demanding recognition for that on my campus and in my classroom. It’s a political assertion to be heard and recognized.

Something else I saw less of then but see now: the mic drop — the notion that once I quote my lived experience, my subjective truth, that ends the conversation. If someone says, as feminist epistemologists did 30 years ago, that standpoint begins the conversation, that’s great. Consider gays and science and all the biological assumptions that heterosexuality is the only way to do stuff. But if instead people say I’m stating my identity, and now we can’t talk about it, you’re disqualified, then that’s a violation of the Constitution of Knowledge.

How afraid are professors of their own students?

I hear that all the time. And they’re not afraid of most of their students. It’s just a handful. I spoke to an untenured but tenure-track professor of neurobiology, and one of her modules early in a course was on autism and how that affects the wiring of the brain at an early age. One student said it offended them because it can be seen as marginalizing to autistic people. This was a student known for their activism. Most students don’t mind in the least learning about autism. So the professor went to her department chair, and the department chair told her to ignore the student. “Great!” I said. “So you kept the module?” And she said no, that she‘d dropped it. “I want tenure, and I interpreted that student complaint as strike one,” she told me. “Why risk strike two or strike three?”

You point out that cancellation campaigns tend to fail when individuals and institutions have backbones. How would you rate the spinal stiffness of college presidents these days?

My impression from folks in the trenches is that it’s not as bad as it could be. Leadership is such an important factor here. The person at the top sets the tone all the way down. And sets expectations. When the crisis comes, it’s too late. You need leaders who establish clear values and promulgate those values to the freshman class when they come in.

I heard an interview you did recently in which you described recent legislative actions, including the anti-critical race theory bills, as a “clear shot across the bow to universities that the time when they could go about their business of allowing small groups of radicals to basically dominate the environment without external political consequences is over.”

I am very unhappy to see politicians barging into campuses and classrooms to dictate what can and cannot be taught. But it’s happening partly as a result of the collapse of credibility on campus. A lot of people out there in political land, especially on the right, think that campuses are engaging in indoctrination and teaching fake facts. This is America, it’s a populist country, it’s a democratic country, and you’re going to see political entrepreneurs make hay with this.

One thing we know from history going back to at least the Scopes Trial is that the worst people on the planet to make curriculum choices or write syllabi are politicians. They should never, ever, ever do it. They’re terrible at it. But now they’re doing it. And my admonition to people in academia is that there’s more to come if you don’t get more conscientious about making campuses more hospitable to a true diversity of ideas.

Today's Elect Left is as Anti-Science as Today's Right

in a way that would have felt quite familiar living under Stalin.

johnmcwhorter.substack.com|John McWhorter

That’s Trofim Lysenko in the photo. He was a brilliant but bad scientist, and we will see his eerie application to our times in a bit.

Watching the ouster of Liz Cheney, many of us marvel that so many of those serious adults in the Republican Party sincerely believe that the last Presidential election was stolen, or at least are willing to put up such a cast-iron front of pretending to.

The mendacity, the numbness to truth, is especially appalling coming along with the denial of science in their positions on climate change and so much else. The Republicans embrace The Big Lie, and to many it’s symptomatic of their being America’s main civic problem.

However, future historians will not see it that way. We live in an era of flabbergasting, shameless lie-mongering on both sides of the political aisle. On the left, this is especially clear in how baldly antiscientific the Elect left is, which is part of why their penchant for labelling their opponents “racists” is so dire – they make the rest of us pretend not to value science along with them.

It isn’t always clear how antithetical to scientific reasoning this fashionable “antiracist” thinking is. Its adherents express themselves with a handy kit of 20 or so fancy words, often with very particular meanings (equity, social justice), often have PhDs, and are culturally associated with enclaves of the educated such as universities, college towns, and cafes.

However, in the grand scheme of things, The Elect reason like Trofim Lysenko and for analogous reasons. Lysenko perverted the scientific endeavor under Stalin, dismissing the tenets of Darwinism and Mendelian genetics because they allowed too much of a role to individual actors, contrary to the focus of Communist ideology on history being shaped by grand, impersonal currents. Scientific research of a great many kinds was shattered in the Soviet Union for decades, and crop yields went down because of Lysenko’s insistence on crackpot notions of agricultural science.

* * *

Take the idea that microaggressions are a grinding problem for black Americans, exerting significant psychological damage upon us, and motivating claims that black students ought be exempt from certain scholastic demands as well as that entire programs and schools should be transformed into Antiracism Academies. A prime motivation of this, reported endlessly, is to relieve black people of the eternal harm that microaggressions condition.

But Edward Cantu and Lee Jussim have patiently demonstrated that the academic “literature” undergirding this depiction is too full of holes to even begin to serve as the basis for societal reform. This is frankly obvious from reading almost any of the work in question – I recommend taking up just one such article and noting the hopeless circularity of argumentation – but Cantu and Jussim have done a useful job in summarizing the lot of it. The literature ignores legions of black people it surveys who deny that acts are microaggressions, does not show that supposed microaggressions correlate with racist sentiment of any kind, is based on tiny sample sizes, is never replicated, and explains away discrepancies with glum little speculations that would not pass as scientific reasoning among any evaluators not cowed by The Elect.

I’ll let the authors speak for themselves:

“Microaggression research provides a veneer of scientific credibility to vested critical premises, as those studies have statistics, p-values, and reliability coefficients, all useful for creating the appearance of scientific foundations for assumptions, so long as one does not examine the methodological details too closely. But the undertone of much microaggression research is not one of caution commensurate with the guardrails normally imposed by the scientific method.”

Yet nationwide, institutions are turning themselves upside down with a blithe assumption that black existence is deeply imprinted by the endless assault of these microaggressions. We can be sure that arguments such as Cantu and Jussim’s will be ignored, despite that if there were a single teeny article somewhere claiming that microaggressions were “the New Jim Crow,” that one would be endlessly assigned to parents and students as “proof.” (One way we know that is that the foundational article on “white privilege” appeared in Peace and Freedom Magazine.)

Another example – the jury has long been in: “diversity, equity and inclusion” training programs simply do not work. This has been proven by many scientific surveys. These programs neither further diversify the workplace nor foster interethnic harmony (and in fact, if anything, increase it).

This literature has no effect on the flowering of these programs nationwide.

As I mentioned in this space, it is an article of faith among The Elect that the cops murder black men out of racist bias. Arguments that the data do not demonstrate this are ignored as serenely as evidence against The Big Lie. Never mind that Roland Fryer has shown that when push comes to shove, it’s whites who are more likely to be murdered by cops; never mind calm, authoritative reports on these issues by black writers like Coleman Hughes; never mind that the numbers alone show that the cops murder many, many more whites a year than blacks.

Instead, we are demanded to assent to an idea that the United States is occupied by a murderously racist police force, as the media scrupulously neglect the myriad killings of whites by cops, leaving black people under the understandable impression that it’s only black people who the cops come after. (Remember, the fact that black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed than our proportion in the population would predict is a statistic known mostly to policy wonks – what primarily moves people to protest is the news, not this statistic.)

Or finally, we have the idea that all discrepancies between the races must be because of “systemic racism” of some kind. This idea is presented as if it were “science” – viewed most generously as what is called by scientists “elegant” in explaining a great deal with minimal machinery. However, this is a generous take indeed, as social science is simply too complex to allow this “elegance.”

The idea that unequal outcomes must be due to unequal opportunity is, quite simply, anti-science, as I outlined here last week with a case study of sorts. It flies in the face of how hard people work to master fields like psychology, sociology, anthropology, and history. People who know this ought to be ashamed of themselves to pretend someone dumbing down reality like this is speaking some kind of truth – they ought self-flagellate themselves a blow for every year they were in school past sixth grade.

A science teacher conference in Washington state last year included a PowerPoint slide preaching that “If you conclude that outcome differences by demographic subgroup are a result of anything other than a broken system, that is, by definition, bigotry.” This should have been corrected:

“If you conclude that outcome differences by demographic subgroup are a result only of a broken system, that is, by definition, willful ignorance.”

* * *

The reason smart people let this anti-scientific thought pass – while scoffing like the rest of us at people like Lysenko – is that they, like him and so many of today’s Republicans, are following a party line. Lysenko’s was Stalinism; the Trumpian right’s to the cult of Him; The Elect’s is the commitment to battling power differentials over everything. “Bravo, Lysenko!” Stalin stood up and cheered after one of Lysenko’s speeches. Ha – “Bravo, DiAngelo!!”

This is why I consider The Elect beyond address, and advise against the idea that we can have actual constructive discussions with them. To do is no more useful than it was to trying to get through to Lysenko and his fans.

Of course, The Elect are not exerting the physical violence and assassinations that Stalinists exerted. My comparison is of the relevant frames of mind. However, The Elect are indeed doing great harm to our society. Anyone who thinks the transformation of our educational establishment is not a real problem is someone I’m not sure I quite understand. And it may be only me who is chilled, disgusted and frightened to see an enlightened Establishment being transformed not by suasion but by simple fear. However, I doubt it, and simply cannot see that what happened in Washington, DC last January means that my concerns are trivial.

The mask-resistant person who sits soberly insisting that Joe Biden stole the election should mystify and appall us no more than the people soberly insisting that microaggressions saddle black people with ongoing PTSD, that organizations will benefit from DEI programs, that any claim of victimization from a descendant of an African slave is automatically valid, that black people should walk in eternal fear of being iced by a cop, that any way that whites and blacks are not equal is due to bigotry “somehow,” and that to disagree with these claims is to be a backwards, heartless pig.

That rhetoric makes perfect sense to them – just as Lysenko thought that the way giraffes’ necks got long was when they stretched upward to eat and this changed the neck genes they passed on to their offspring.

He put his ideas into books. It soon became clear that if you disagreed with him things weren’t going to go well for you – there, you got killed; here, you get called a racist on Twitter. As such, his fans read his stuff and celebrated themselves for “Doing the work.”

Lysenkoism was a political campaign led by Trofim Lysenko against genetics and science-based agriculture in the mid-20th century, rejecting natural selection in favour of Lamarckism and exaggerated claims for the benefits of vernalization and grafting. Lysenko served as the director of the Soviet Union’s Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In time, it has come to be identified as any deliberate distortion of scientific facts or theories for purposes that are deemed politically, religiously or socially desirable.

Life was good to me. America was one of the friendliest countries I've ever been to.

But then college was like, you know, it taught Critical Theory, it taught Critical Race Theory when it came to like, sociology and stuff like that. It was dark.

The trouble is when you learn from that lens, and that's really kind of what some classes took - it wasn't like, oh “this is a theory” or “this is a school of thought.” It was this is how you have to look at life, these are the tools and that's it, this is actually what reality is.

I had that framework kind of begin to get embedded in me but - pay attention to the feeling - I didn't feel good about it.

I remember the one day, it was raining outside, it was almost Halloween, I think it was 2014, and we were learning about symbolism [..] and it just felt dark. I literally felt like my heart was opening and darkness was coming inside. From that moment, it was dark.

As I adopted that lens through college, my outlook of the world was dark and hopeless. Little did I know my outlook of the world would then come back to affect my look and the way I saw myself, who I was, the value that I brought, how people saw me, all just deteriorated, because it was like I had to take all these factors into consideration.

I came out of college with that worldview. I came out of college thinking, as a black woman, opportunities for me are so much less likely to happen or be given because of my blackness. That I was very much so hyper-aware of microaggressions.

I was very aware of just the way the world is, the way you're taught that the world is. So it's like everything's working against you. Literally, you walk out of the door and everyone is conspiring against you. So whereas from the beginning, I would just kind of walk down the street and say hi to people, if they didn't say hi back I was like whatever. It was like every look that I got was it was racist. It was just racist. And it was also racist-sexist, it was more than just one thing. It was everything you are is everything someone else hates.

Like literally, walk down to the store and I'll not pay attention to all the people who walked by me and who were just normal. I would walk by, say, 10 people, and if one person gave me a bad look, or you know they didn't move out of the way, like they're walking and then, you know, it's oh what do you do and they just keep going... I interpreted that as it's an act it's a microaggression. Like, that is an act of racism.

So, regardless of all the other interactions that was fine, that one thing would ruin my day. I remember I felt like I would have a dagger in my heart. But it wasn't just that, see that's just going to the store.

Now you have to go through the whole day, and if you ever get anything of someone treating you like crap, or if you ever get someone who like, opens the door right, for maybe their family and then like, you're far away off and they don't open the door for you... actions like that I would interpret all of that as microaggressions against me.

So that would make me so fragile that by the end of the day, I'm literally, I'm filled with so much darkness, I'm filled with so much anxiety, I'm filled with so much stress, that I can't even do my normal work.

I can't live my life like that right. I can't live and actually work and give a hundred percent of the task because I'm kind of under stress and duress. So yeah, that's what life was like, honestly that's what life was like when you are hyper-aware of all these kind of Critical Theory notions and ideas, especially the neo-Marxism stuff.

[..]

Wokeness was literally crippling me. Literally crippling me.