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E-Pluribus | June 22, 2021

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E-Pluribus | June 22, 2021

Book burning has begun, when is a black hole more than a black hole, and reminders from Alexis de Tocqueville.

Jeryl Bier
Jun 22, 2021
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E-Pluribus | June 22, 2021

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A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Abigail Shrier: The Books Are Already Burning

The silent majority has been silent long enough as far as Abigail Shrier is concerned. Shrier submits that it’s time for those concerned with the illiberal direction of today’s public discourse to stop sheltering behind those willing to take the hits publicly and start taking their own risks for the good of all.

The silent supporters have each performed the same risk-benefit calculation and arrived at the same conclusion: Speaking up isn’t worth it. It could cost a job, reputation, peace and friends — it requires the assumption of risk and a willingness to sacrifice.  

And it is easy to justify our silence. We tell ourselves that we are protecting our families by remaining quiet and in the short-term, and we may be. But we are also handing our children over to a culture in which freedom of conscience and expression are drowned out. We are teaching our children that truth shouldn’t be our primary concern — or at least, that truth is negotiable or subordinate to being agreeable. They are learning that it is more important to remain acceptable to the powerful than to be truly free.

Whether or not most people admit it, what keeps them from speaking up in the face of what they know is wrong is fear. Fear not primarily of unemployment, though that is a pressing concern, but fear of ostracism. This deep and ancient fear is behind our desperate reach for innocence and safety when we virtue signal. By contrast, we stand exposed when we speak unpopular truth. Within your tribe, there will be people who pull away from you, and if you think well of them — and sadly, even if you don’t — this causes pain. 

Read it all here.

Heather Mac Donald: Down a Black Hole

The interval between parody and reality is shrinking. Heather Mac Donald writes about the (apparent) connection between cosmological phenomenon and… yes, race.

[…] “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos” asks the question, “Is there a connection between the cosmos and the idea of racial blackness?” Anyone familiar with academia’s racial monomania knows the answer: of course there is! Though “conventional wisdom,” according to the catalog description of “Black Holes: Race and the Cosmos,” holds that the “‘black’ in black holes has nothing to do with race,” astronomy professor Nicholas Battaglia and comparative literature professor Parisa Vaziri know better.

Battaglia and Vaziri puncture the “conventional wisdom” by drawing on theorists such as Emory University English professor Michelle Wright. Wright’s book, The Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, invokes “Newton’s laws of motion and gravity” and “theoretical particle physics” to “subvert racist assumptions about Blackness.” The Cornell course also studies music by Sun Ra and Outkast to “conjure blackness through cosmological themes.”

Read the whole thing.

Eric Clifford Graf: Tocqueville and Us

“Nobody expects to become the Spanish Inquisition. But we all do.” Monty Python and Alexis de Tocqueville work comfortably if incongruously side by side in this Eric Clifford Graf piece at Quillette. Graf writes that Tocqueville’s classic and timeless outsider’s look at America reminds citizen’s there is much to guard against, including ourselves, if we wish to preserve our hard-won and unique democratic republic.

Why does ego-based factionalism occur and why is it so particular to America? Tocqueville skips over its ultimate origins because, unlike today, a classically educated liberal knew that humanity’s urge to divide into destructive opponents needed no explanation. Plato, Thucydides, Apuleius, Augustine, Dante, Montaigne, and Cervantes had shown how hatred, resentment, and cruelty are always at the ready to dash a civilization’s greatest achievements. When Romantics like Burke, Tocqueville, and Poe pause to ponder the sublimity of nature, this is what they want us to understand.

But Tocqueville does clarify why America is a specific engine for the extremes of narcissistic collectivism. For starters, Democracy in America previews the main aspects of Steele’s argument (a lesson partly transmitted to Tocqueville by my own state’s national hero, American general Sam Houston). Race-based slavery in the context of the greatest explosion of wealth in history created a psychosocial excuse whereby the racial minority most excluded from that prosperity rejected its values. White people’s zealous acceptance of responsibility for this inequity set in motion poor solutions, the secondary enslavements of moral extortion and dependency. Lastly, confidence in the angelic status of elected rulers paved a seductive road of entitlements for the descendants of slaves.

[…]

Three unrelenting psychosocial factors underwrite ego-based factionalism in the United States: (1) people always form factions; (2) the most basic mode of faction is shared egotism; (3) the equality wrought by democracy and free markets leaves many without ways of distinguishing themselves from others, which inclines them to project their ego as a faction. As Mark Twain later put it, in a hyper-democracy, our hollow selves take to factions like fashions.

Read it all at Quillette.

Around Twitter

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has released a recording from a workshop the University of Oklahoma where professors discuss how to censor and report their students:

Twitter avatar for @TheFIREorg
FIRE @TheFIREorg
BREAKING: A recording of an “Anti-Racist Rhetoric & Pedagogies” workshop acquired by FIRE raises alarm bells about the state of free expression and conscience at @UofOklahoma. go.thefire.org/l/869921/2021-…
Image
4:18 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
150Likes75Retweets
Twitter avatar for @TheFIREorg
FIRE @TheFIREorg
@UofOklahoma “I, in this case, usually look for my students who might be, like, entertaining the idea of listening to a problematic argument. Then I say, ‘we don’t have to listen to that.’” That’s right — even thinking about listening to a disfavored argument is apparently to be discouraged.
4:21 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
38Likes5Retweets
Twitter avatar for @TheFIREorg
FIRE @TheFIREorg
One instructor notes that if students use “derogatory remarks, critiques, and hate speech,” as well as “white supremacist ideas or sources,” she will call the student out. And if it happens again, “report them.”
4:27 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
29Likes3Retweets
Twitter avatar for @TheFIREorg
FIRE @TheFIREorg
Imagine being an OU student who is “reported,” presumably to the administration, simply for your choice of text to analyze or what sources you include in a bibliography.
4:28 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
32Likes1Retweet
Twitter avatar for @TheFIREorg
FIRE @TheFIREorg
Professors cannot abuse their power to require students to adhere to a particular viewpoint or ideology.
4:29 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
38Likes2Retweets
Twitter avatar for @TheFIREorg
FIRE @TheFIREorg
As FIRE’s Guide to First-Year Orientation and Thought Reform on Campus explains: thefire.org/research/publi…
Image
4:31 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
27Likes4Retweets
Twitter avatar for @TheFIREorg
FIRE @TheFIREorg
Watch the full video and take action: Demand that @UofOklahoma stop infringing on students' rights to free speech and conscience. Full video: youtube.com/watch?v=Byxl61… Take action:
thefire.org‘Stop talking right now’: University of Oklahoma training shows instructors how to censor, indoctrinate studentsA faculty member leading a University of Oklahoma training seminar on anti-racism made alarming claims about censoring free expression in the classroom.
4:36 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
20Likes6Retweets

Thomas Chatterton Williams on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s apparent “White hegemony” faux pas.

Twitter avatar for @thomaschattwill
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 @thomaschattwill
Here we go. The struggle will never be over—can never be over—because whiteness will always be redefined: “The problem is believing that “Latino-ness” presents a worthy “alternative” to U.S. whiteness, when it is simply White hegemony by another name.”
washingtonpost.comOpinion | ‘In the Heights’ is just more of the same whitewashed HollywoodWhy highlight a Black Latino population if your interpretation needed to erase a large portion of the Blackness to tell it?
2:12 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
256Likes28Retweets
Twitter avatar for @thomaschattwill
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 @thomaschattwill
Lin-Manuel Miranda is an agent of “white hegemony” now.
2:13 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
118Likes7Retweets
Twitter avatar for @thomaschattwill
Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 @thomaschattwill
Really starting to intuit the logic of the guillotine more and more. You see how deep approval, deference and admiration can flip in an instant against even the likes of Miranda or Adichie and you learn something about the nature (and shortsightedness) of revolutionary fervor.
2:19 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
202Likes22Retweets

Christopher Rufo notes that the Washington Post’s story on him was deeply flawed:

Twitter avatar for @realchrisrufo
Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ @realchrisrufo
WINNING: The Washington Post's hitpiece against me has collapsed. They have admitted to fabricating a timeline, retracted or added six full paragraphs, reversed a key claim, and failed to produce evidence of a falsified quotation. Democracy dies when the media lies.
Image
1:41 AM ∙ Jun 22, 2021
18,134Likes5,325Retweets

Are classroom really encouraging an open exchange of ideas? Conservative students are not convinced:

Twitter avatar for @HdxAcademy
Heterodox Academy @HdxAcademy
"A large majority (86 percent) of students with liberal political views believe the classroom climate encourages diverse views, while just over half of students with conservative views believe this is the case." ndsu.edu/fileadmin/chal…
Image
1:00 PM ∙ Jun 22, 2021

Here’s one student’s thoughts via the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism:

Twitter avatar for @fairforall_org
Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR) @fairforall_org
Increasingly, our schools are teaching kids to obsess over immutable characteristics. Hear this high school student speak up about growing resentment, tribalism, and intolerance in the classroom. #BeProHuman
Image
8:25 PM ∙ Jun 21, 2021
384Likes133Retweets

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E-Pluribus | June 22, 2021

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