To see the whole picture, find the frame. To get the whole story, remember the beginning and the end. A look at accusation, the next bully tactic of supremacists and other abusers.
I am afraid it does matter who is president of Harvard. This is a discomfiting display of power over the most singularly powerful private knowledge producing institution in America.
The right intends to go after and destroy two major sources of knowledge it cannot directly control 1) the US federal agencies. 2) the universities
It can control agencies indirectly through appointments but the workers in these agencies have civil service protections. So they remain essential sources of scientific and government and social knowledge.
When the right realizes what is going on, they push back on knowledge and information, e.g., the knowledge from the CDC that owning a gun is more dangerous than not owning a gun, that it increases your likelihood of being shot.
So they can make inroads but they can't fully shut everyone up.
They can crush climate change efforts in NASA and the EPA but they can't obliterate all knowledge and remove all scientists--yet. Economists, social scientists, etc. remain beyond their power.
They have explicitly said they want to destroy these agencies. Two of our greatest environmental philosophers--Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson--were government scientists.
Government scientists are vainly and desperately trying to wake the public up about climate change right now.
The second source of free information is the university. People are amazingly unconcerned about this even though education is one of the most important social institutions in society.
The university is constantly under attack by the right but has proved somewhat resilient due its structure, and the fact they can't directly buy it.
In addition, most of the independent authoritative knowledge runs through universities in one way or another. Not to mention the thing they hate most, which is information that can disprove a lot of their lies about a lot of different things--economics, health, race, history, environmental science, pretty much everything.
Now they've shown universities can be divided and conquered just like society at large has been. You can make Jewish people so angry about protests that you can get them to go after academic freedom, and this means it's possible to do this for other things if you can whip resentful donors into a collective bloc. Which is a new method, unlike the political method used before.
Basically they are not just in your face bigots but also termites constantly nibbling on the substructure.
And they just had a major breakthrough.
Academics barely fight this attacks. The Gay 'charges' were massively trumped up but most wouldn't speak out until it was too late because the issue was complicated and they weren't sure how it looks.
Nobody is fighting for the university because the right has successfully smeared and slandered it and academics are too self hating or easily made to feel guilty or something to push back. Maybe people are right that explaining why we're important would just make it worse even though the US university system is the envy of the world, and a hub of the educated world.
But they produce a population that votes Democratic.
I got Rufo'd. I'm a Virginia resident and watched that Youngkin-CRT thing happen in real time like a slo-mo horror flick. If you're a manipulative monster and ya got no soul, America must be a field of beautiful flowers just waiting to be picked. This is a terrific essay. Cheers!
Thank you so much for this. I was briefly back on FB (always a bad idea) where i saw my earnest colleagues in the philosophy profession cosplaying Harvard's scientific integrity committee.
I objected, "What are you doing? Why are you playing into Rufo's hand?" -- they replied they were upholding the highest standards of academic integrity, and sadly and regretfully they had to admit that Gay's case was more than sloppiness in citation. They cited approvingly from Free Beacon and other right wing rags, saying how regretful they were to have to cite "right-wing rags."
Anyway, I was trying to articulate these past few days why I thought this focus on Gay's academic track record was a terrible idea. The sense I got on closed FB group for people of color in academia was clear: If you get on a position of prestige and prominence, they will come after you. They will come after you, because they think you do not deserve it.
That is the message they (we) got and Black women in particular got. That my white colleagues don't see that, even aid and abet the people who seek to destroy us by weaponizing our sense of integrity against us, is particularly tragic.
Finally, I love your articulation of the guiding spirit as our collective consciousness reacting against the serious brokenness in our society. We are all so deeply damaged and harmed by this, and our psychodrama of focusing on plagiarism rather than the political motives that put the spotlight in Gay are one of our many bad coping mechanisms. You might like, or perhaps already know, this paper by Liam Kofi Bright -- https://philarchive.org/archive/BRIWP
Anyway, thank you for this piece. I found it very insightful.
Thanks for this piece, which helped me formulate my objection to John McWhorter’s New York Times column today, “Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black”. In a sense, his interpretation exemplifies what happens when the framing is ignored.
I love your essays, and this one is no exception. But sometimes I need a screen reader, and using multiple underscores to signify a blank or x really disrupts the whole thing! I had to eventually skip ahead past that section to continue listening. Just letting you know!
Thank you as always for your helpful framing and insights.
Great essay, as usual. One minor quibble: In the first footnote, you refer to "Elaine Stefanik," who you describe as a Republican Senator from New York. I think the figure you're thinking of is Elise Stefanik, who is a member of the House, representing the 21st district of New York.
Having personally experienced this supremacist/elimination in action and witnessed the MSM pick up the S/E spin I find your framing especially helpful & it will help me with my words of trying to explain what happened. Any thread started by S/E by pulling on it will lead to truth/justice/civil rights/thoughtful actions being unraveled. Thank you
Disgusting! We white people who are allies of black people can never let our guard down nor stop speaking out against racism! This country was built on the backs of black Americans. We would not be the richest country on Earth had it not been for their forced, free labor. "None of us is free until all of us are free. Reparations for foundational black Americans would be a start. The O. W. L. (old white lesbian)
This isn't new, as I'm sure you know. I recall when the release of a list of Frank Luntz talking points -- words and phrases he was going to tell Republicans to use to describe Democratic proposals -- was treated as a news event itself.
It might be time to realize that places like the New York Times do this because they actually want to, because they actually agree with the supremacists, because they are supremacists.
It's certainly been frustrating to see the evolution from "we're leaving it up to the states" and "we've got to ban trans and gay books and trans healthcare to protect the children!" And now we've seen the deliberate cruelty of denying a woman reproductive healthcare AND stated threats by Ken Paxton to any doctor in the state who would have found the courage to provide her care... AND the proposed extension of anti-trans healthcare laws in several states to NOW include adults.
All along this path, I've tried to tell people these were incremental dominoes in a larger agenda to erode other people's rights, and done with a cynical expectation that those who don't think they personally will be affected (and feel icky about abortions and trans people) would go along or even endorse these changes by accepting these false narratives about their true intention. The true intention has always been controlling and eventually eliminating entirely those things and people that they don't think should exist in our society, full stop.
"First they came for the trans people and the pregnant people... and I didn't speak out, because I was not them" as the case might be. It's deeply infuriating that so many people either can't understand the scope of the bigger picture, or that they are emotionally invested in that supremacist outcome and think it will somehow turn out better for them this time, than it did when Nazis in Germany took it for a go.
Anybody who wants to run Rufo's corpus of work through TurnItIn and report on the results, I've got $300 in a pool to pay for the work and would welcome more...
I tend to be an optimist, I suppose, but maybe this new focus on the Ivy League is a response to Rufo's utter failure to make DEI-hatin' into a genuine and successful popular movement? I remember after Glenn Youngkin's win in Virginia, all the right-wingers were on a high, they'd found the issue that would pay off in the midterms and in local elections all over the country. Steve Bannon was promoting a "take over the school boards" plan, and with Moms For Liberty leading the charge, and with millions of dollars to spend (and who ever has money to spend in a school board election?) the whole thing was a massive flop. By one count, Moms For Liberty-endorsed candidates lost in 70% of their races. Even the Loudon County School Board, once touted as an indicator of the coming backlash from outraged anti-woke parents, flipped back to majority Democratic control.
OK, so after finding that this nonsense doesn't get you much traction with normal people, Rufo is now engineering the defenestration of University presidents with the help of billionaire donors and the New York Times. Because that's the bubble-world where he lives and the only place his "ideas" find success.
I appreciate your general sentiment; my question is how do we operationalize ignoring supremacists in the media ecology of the 21st Century?
We're in a different political moment than, say, the 1960s, when the hard right had more trouble getting traction within the Republican party. Today they effectively control the party and have the backing of right-wing media outlets that influence a significant portion of the electorate. In addition, corporate social media allows a much more porous public discourse where traditional journalistic gatekeeping simply doesn't work anymore.
We should criticize the way the mainstream media -- and particularly the New York Times -- has handled the recent higher ed. dustup, but if we're being honest we might also acknowledge that it isn't very hard for propagandists such as Rufo to elicit a reactive stimulus-response from left-of-center activists.
The attacks to our collective cracks and weaknesses, not for the betterment of humanity but for the underhanded attainment of legitimacy and power, is terrifyingly obvious now.
I am afraid it does matter who is president of Harvard. This is a discomfiting display of power over the most singularly powerful private knowledge producing institution in America.
The right intends to go after and destroy two major sources of knowledge it cannot directly control 1) the US federal agencies. 2) the universities
It can control agencies indirectly through appointments but the workers in these agencies have civil service protections. So they remain essential sources of scientific and government and social knowledge.
When the right realizes what is going on, they push back on knowledge and information, e.g., the knowledge from the CDC that owning a gun is more dangerous than not owning a gun, that it increases your likelihood of being shot.
So they can make inroads but they can't fully shut everyone up.
They can crush climate change efforts in NASA and the EPA but they can't obliterate all knowledge and remove all scientists--yet. Economists, social scientists, etc. remain beyond their power.
They have explicitly said they want to destroy these agencies. Two of our greatest environmental philosophers--Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson--were government scientists.
Government scientists are vainly and desperately trying to wake the public up about climate change right now.
The second source of free information is the university. People are amazingly unconcerned about this even though education is one of the most important social institutions in society.
The university is constantly under attack by the right but has proved somewhat resilient due its structure, and the fact they can't directly buy it.
In addition, most of the independent authoritative knowledge runs through universities in one way or another. Not to mention the thing they hate most, which is information that can disprove a lot of their lies about a lot of different things--economics, health, race, history, environmental science, pretty much everything.
Now they've shown universities can be divided and conquered just like society at large has been. You can make Jewish people so angry about protests that you can get them to go after academic freedom, and this means it's possible to do this for other things if you can whip resentful donors into a collective bloc. Which is a new method, unlike the political method used before.
Basically they are not just in your face bigots but also termites constantly nibbling on the substructure.
And they just had a major breakthrough.
Academics barely fight this attacks. The Gay 'charges' were massively trumped up but most wouldn't speak out until it was too late because the issue was complicated and they weren't sure how it looks.
Nobody is fighting for the university because the right has successfully smeared and slandered it and academics are too self hating or easily made to feel guilty or something to push back. Maybe people are right that explaining why we're important would just make it worse even though the US university system is the envy of the world, and a hub of the educated world.
But they produce a population that votes Democratic.
I got Rufo'd. I'm a Virginia resident and watched that Youngkin-CRT thing happen in real time like a slo-mo horror flick. If you're a manipulative monster and ya got no soul, America must be a field of beautiful flowers just waiting to be picked. This is a terrific essay. Cheers!
Thank you so much for this. I was briefly back on FB (always a bad idea) where i saw my earnest colleagues in the philosophy profession cosplaying Harvard's scientific integrity committee.
I objected, "What are you doing? Why are you playing into Rufo's hand?" -- they replied they were upholding the highest standards of academic integrity, and sadly and regretfully they had to admit that Gay's case was more than sloppiness in citation. They cited approvingly from Free Beacon and other right wing rags, saying how regretful they were to have to cite "right-wing rags."
Anyway, I was trying to articulate these past few days why I thought this focus on Gay's academic track record was a terrible idea. The sense I got on closed FB group for people of color in academia was clear: If you get on a position of prestige and prominence, they will come after you. They will come after you, because they think you do not deserve it.
That is the message they (we) got and Black women in particular got. That my white colleagues don't see that, even aid and abet the people who seek to destroy us by weaponizing our sense of integrity against us, is particularly tragic.
Finally, I love your articulation of the guiding spirit as our collective consciousness reacting against the serious brokenness in our society. We are all so deeply damaged and harmed by this, and our psychodrama of focusing on plagiarism rather than the political motives that put the spotlight in Gay are one of our many bad coping mechanisms. You might like, or perhaps already know, this paper by Liam Kofi Bright -- https://philarchive.org/archive/BRIWP
Anyway, thank you for this piece. I found it very insightful.
Thanks for this piece, which helped me formulate my objection to John McWhorter’s New York Times column today, “Claudine Gay Was Not Driven Out Because She Is Black”. In a sense, his interpretation exemplifies what happens when the framing is ignored.
https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2024/01/john-mcwhorters-misreading-of-pressure.html
I love your essays, and this one is no exception. But sometimes I need a screen reader, and using multiple underscores to signify a blank or x really disrupts the whole thing! I had to eventually skip ahead past that section to continue listening. Just letting you know!
Thank you as always for your helpful framing and insights.
Great essay, as usual. One minor quibble: In the first footnote, you refer to "Elaine Stefanik," who you describe as a Republican Senator from New York. I think the figure you're thinking of is Elise Stefanik, who is a member of the House, representing the 21st district of New York.
Having personally experienced this supremacist/elimination in action and witnessed the MSM pick up the S/E spin I find your framing especially helpful & it will help me with my words of trying to explain what happened. Any thread started by S/E by pulling on it will lead to truth/justice/civil rights/thoughtful actions being unraveled. Thank you
Disgusting! We white people who are allies of black people can never let our guard down nor stop speaking out against racism! This country was built on the backs of black Americans. We would not be the richest country on Earth had it not been for their forced, free labor. "None of us is free until all of us are free. Reparations for foundational black Americans would be a start. The O. W. L. (old white lesbian)
This isn't new, as I'm sure you know. I recall when the release of a list of Frank Luntz talking points -- words and phrases he was going to tell Republicans to use to describe Democratic proposals -- was treated as a news event itself.
It might be time to realize that places like the New York Times do this because they actually want to, because they actually agree with the supremacists, because they are supremacists.
It's certainly been frustrating to see the evolution from "we're leaving it up to the states" and "we've got to ban trans and gay books and trans healthcare to protect the children!" And now we've seen the deliberate cruelty of denying a woman reproductive healthcare AND stated threats by Ken Paxton to any doctor in the state who would have found the courage to provide her care... AND the proposed extension of anti-trans healthcare laws in several states to NOW include adults.
All along this path, I've tried to tell people these were incremental dominoes in a larger agenda to erode other people's rights, and done with a cynical expectation that those who don't think they personally will be affected (and feel icky about abortions and trans people) would go along or even endorse these changes by accepting these false narratives about their true intention. The true intention has always been controlling and eventually eliminating entirely those things and people that they don't think should exist in our society, full stop.
"First they came for the trans people and the pregnant people... and I didn't speak out, because I was not them" as the case might be. It's deeply infuriating that so many people either can't understand the scope of the bigger picture, or that they are emotionally invested in that supremacist outcome and think it will somehow turn out better for them this time, than it did when Nazis in Germany took it for a go.
Anybody who wants to run Rufo's corpus of work through TurnItIn and report on the results, I've got $300 in a pool to pay for the work and would welcome more...
I tend to be an optimist, I suppose, but maybe this new focus on the Ivy League is a response to Rufo's utter failure to make DEI-hatin' into a genuine and successful popular movement? I remember after Glenn Youngkin's win in Virginia, all the right-wingers were on a high, they'd found the issue that would pay off in the midterms and in local elections all over the country. Steve Bannon was promoting a "take over the school boards" plan, and with Moms For Liberty leading the charge, and with millions of dollars to spend (and who ever has money to spend in a school board election?) the whole thing was a massive flop. By one count, Moms For Liberty-endorsed candidates lost in 70% of their races. Even the Loudon County School Board, once touted as an indicator of the coming backlash from outraged anti-woke parents, flipped back to majority Democratic control.
OK, so after finding that this nonsense doesn't get you much traction with normal people, Rufo is now engineering the defenestration of University presidents with the help of billionaire donors and the New York Times. Because that's the bubble-world where he lives and the only place his "ideas" find success.
> They simply aren’t the best candidates.
Precisely.
Thanks for another brilliant post.
Basically the autocrats are busy drilling holes in the ship of democracy, and are proposing that yachts will rescue those worth and worthy of saving.
I appreciate your general sentiment; my question is how do we operationalize ignoring supremacists in the media ecology of the 21st Century?
We're in a different political moment than, say, the 1960s, when the hard right had more trouble getting traction within the Republican party. Today they effectively control the party and have the backing of right-wing media outlets that influence a significant portion of the electorate. In addition, corporate social media allows a much more porous public discourse where traditional journalistic gatekeeping simply doesn't work anymore.
We should criticize the way the mainstream media -- and particularly the New York Times -- has handled the recent higher ed. dustup, but if we're being honest we might also acknowledge that it isn't very hard for propagandists such as Rufo to elicit a reactive stimulus-response from left-of-center activists.
The attacks to our collective cracks and weaknesses, not for the betterment of humanity but for the underhanded attainment of legitimacy and power, is terrifyingly obvious now.
Wild times.