E-Pluribus | February 11, 2022
E-Pluribus | February 11, 2022
Why deplatforming is getting more difficult, family court and gender ideology, and how one institution on the leading edge of anti-CRT work views its role.
A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Megan McArdle: The Joe Rogan case is the latest example of how ‘deplatforming’ doesn’t work
Writing from the inside a mainstream outlet, The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle highlights the shift that has occurred in media over the last few decades that explains at least part of the uproar over Joe Rogan and why he is more likely than ever to survive the current brouhaha. While the mainstream media feels freer than ever to focus on its own values, audiences with different sets of values simply find someone already saying what they believe rather than sticking around to be persuaded.
[W]e — the educated elite populating information industries such as media and academia — were steadily pressured to stop pandering to those people. Instead we were exhorted to shun “false balance” in favor of “moral clarity,” to become “overt and candid advocates for social justice.”
This succeeded, after a fashion: Academic disciplines moved steadily to the left, and under former president Donald Trump my profession purged journalists who violated progressive sensibilities, and frequently interrupted ourselves to remind readers that the president was a racist liar.
Hearteningly, most of our readers agreed with us. But then, they had agreed before we said it, which is a major problem with all the theories about creating social change by language-policing the educated elite. By the time the idea vendors were ready to act on those theories, we weren’t so much speaking truth to power, as preaching to a modestly sized choir.
[ . . . ]
The activists somehow imagine themselves wielding that kind of influence without making those kinds of concessions — and moreover, somehow doing so in a media market that technological change has carved up into a thousand pieces. America arguably doesn’t have a “mainstream” culture any more, but if it does, “mainstream media” reporters rarely now speak to it; our audience has narrowed ideologically and demographically. As for the rest of the United States, just 21 percent of Americans say they strongly trust newspapers today, and television news fares even worse.
That more select audience has benefits; it grants us the freedom to morally clarify on matters of social justice. But by the same token, our clarion call to the nation is in practice more of a pep rally for the local Boosters Club. The minds we long to change have deserted us for Rogan or Fox News.
Read it all here.
Abigail Shrier: Child Custody’s Gender Gauntlet
Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters shook up the discussion on transgender issues perhaps more than any other. Her current article at City Journal exposes how gender ideology is impacting the courts and child custody cases in particular. Concerted efforts have been made by transgender advocates to “educate” those in the court system, and those efforts appear to be bearing fruit, in some cases to the detriment of concerned parents.
At a February 2017 conference of the United States division of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (USPATH), an attendant asked two of the gender doctors—University of Southern California pediatrician Johanna Olson-Kennedy and Brown University professor of pediatrics Michelle Forcier—whether there was a way legally to compel parents to medically transition their children. “Even if you get a court order, the most protective factor for a good outcome is parental support. So it’s not my first line to go to the court to get [a pediatric patient] what they need. But it is my second line and I will do it.”
“There’s no precedent” for legally compelling parents, Forcier agreed. “But you can again work with the child protection team for medical neglect. Work with one parent, at least to get things started. And again, you can do some education.”
In fact, Forcier added, “We did education with judges in Rhode Island. We spent half a day with family court judges, telling them this is what gender and transgender is.”
[ . . . ]
This is gender ideology—the belief, not backed by any meaningful empirical evidence, that we all have an ineffable gender identity, knowable only to us. This identity has no observable markers, and it is immutable (until the moment we change our minds and reveal ourselves as “gender fluid,” of course). It is promoted by virtually every practitioner of “gender-affirming care,” it is unfalsifiable, and its hold on our legal system is gaining ground.
After years of lobbying by gender activists, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), Tenth Revision, which went into effect in January of this year, eliminated the term “gender dysphoria.” This standard international textbook of disease renames the condition “gender incongruence,” and reclassifies it under “sexual health.” The psychological symptom—“distress”—no longer appears; according to the most authoritative diagnostic text used by doctors the world over, a once-mental condition is now just a physical one. One might forgive courts for assuming, then, that a physical problem must have a physical solution.
Courts are adopting this view and seeing a child who has a feeling of gender dysphoria as no different from one born with a cleft palate. From this perspective, the only relevant question in a custody dispute involving a transgender-identified minor is: When will you allow him to get the necessary surgery to fix his body? Once a court swallows gender ideology, in other words, judges will believe that the only thing left for a loving parent to do, after an adolescent announces a trans identity, is shuttle him to the doctors who will alter his body and contribute clapping-hands emojis to the photos he posts on Instagram.
Read the whole thing.
Jay Caspian Kang: The Anti-C.R.T. Movement and a Vision For a New Right Wing
Christopher Rufo’s anti-critical race theory work has been somewhat controversial, even within the universe of those skeptical of or in outright opposition to CRT. At The New York Times, Jay Caspian Kang interviews Reihan Salam about Rufo’s efforts for the Manhattan Institute and how that institution frames its opposition to CRT in light of its broader objectives.
The national meltdown over critical race theory… can quite easily be traced back to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that employs Christopher Rufo, the country’s pre-eminent critic of critical race theory. The group has historically been funded by corporations, political interest groups like EdChoice, which promotes voucher programs, and wealthy private donors like the Koch brothers and the Bradley Foundation.
Why has the Manhattan Institute, which typically focuses on economic policy, immigration, crime and education policy, turned so much of its attention to the critical race theory culture war? Is it just a way to sow racial discord and “own the libs”? Does it come out of a sincere desire to eliminate a type of racialized thinking from public schools? Or is there some larger vision of conservative politics that’s at play here?
[ . . . ]
[Reihan Salam:] Crime and public safety have been absolutely central to our work. Partly because, at a moment when virtually all elite institutions, including elite institutions on the right, were oriented toward criminal justice reform, we were saying: “Look, responsible, thoughtful, measured reform may well make sense. But what we want to do is avoid some kind of mechanistic lurch toward a permissive bias.”
And also the intersection of race and public policy. If you look at every important policy debate right now, there’s a way in which classic empirical debates have been overshadowed by a debate over what is and is not racist, with the definition of what counts as racist growing ever more expansive and totalizing.
I think it freezes a lot of people, including a lot of people of color, out of conversations. I think that it has obscured a lot of the diversity of opinion, a lot of different communities. If you’re a nonwhite person who dissents from elite progressive opinion, you are guilty of “multiracial whiteness.” We see this in debates about environmental policy, about health policy, any number of things. So I think that squarely addressing that is especially important in diverse communities, because these are communities where it winds up having very material consequences.
Read it all.
Around Twitter
Shadi Hamid of The Brookings Institution calls out the White House for wading into the Joe Rogan controversy, and calls out the media for not calling out the White House. Wesley Yang also chimes in:
Via Heterodox Academy, Alex Small on diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in hiring practices:
Hypocrisy is in the eye of the beholder when it comes to Canada’s Freedom Convoy:
And finally, if you are convinced the left will never hold itself accountable, this report on the Black Lives Matter national organization qualifies as an exception:
