Category: Authoritarian Left

Jon Chait on Left-wing illiberalism, and why it needs to be called out

June 17, 2020 • 1:30 pm

In an increasingly woke New York Magazine, there are two breaths of fresh air: Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Chait. Chait, like me, calls himself a liberal but spends a not inconsiderable amount of time excoriating the excesses of the Left, an endeavor he extends and explains in this week’s column (click on screenshot to read it):

Chait’s theme is based on a couple of examples of Authoritarian Left social-media hounding. Several involve something that seems to have become anathema to the Left: calling out those protestors, especially in antiracist demonstrations, who commit violence, arson, looting, and so on. Although nobody explicitly approves of this behavior, even mentioning it now brings a “yes but. . .” from certain segments of the Left. I myself have been criticized for decrying violence (mostly on the grounds that “it was minor and look at Trump on the other side”), and I won’t dwell on the kinds of ripostes that are used not to defend violence but to minimize it.

As I’ve mentioned before, though, such tactics are not only immoral, but counterproductive. Work by Princeton professor Omar Wasow has shown that, in the Sixties, black-led protests that were nonviolent tended to sway people towards Democrats in the areas of the protests, while violent protests turned people towards “law and order” Republican candidates. Wasow claims that his data show, for instance, that this effect may have swung the 1968 election from Hubert Humphrey to Richard Nixon.

Well, I haven’t read Wasow’s paper, but let’s assume, since it was peer reviewed, that it’s worth considering. One who considered it was David Shor, a Democratic data analyst who committed the sin of tweeting out Wasow’s results:

Although that tweet is innocuous, it was the beginning of the end for Shor, as the social-media opprobrium began. Chait notes:

It is easy to see why a specialist in public opinion whose professional mission is to help elect Democrats while moving the party leftward would take an interest in this research. But in certain quarters of the left — though not among Democratic elected officials — criticizing violent protest tactics is considered improper on the grounds that it distracts from deeper underlying injustice, and shifts the blame from police and other malefactors onto their victims.

And so, despite its superficially innocuous content, Shor’s tweet generated a sharp response. To take one public example, Ari Trujillo Wesler, the founder of OpenField, a Democratic canvassing app, replied, “This take is tone deaf, removes responsibility for depressed turnout from the 68 Party, and reeks of anti-blackness.”

Shor replied politely:

But after a short review, Shor’s employer, Civis Analytics, fired him. He was accused of all sorts of ridiculous things, as Chait recounts:

Over the weekend, “Progressphiles,” a progressive data listserv, announced it was kicking Shor out, according to another member of the group. Shor, who did not respond to comment, has been a member of the group but has not posted there in two years. The entire reason for his removal is the controversy over his “racist” tweet:

David Shor, a member of this community, knowingly harassed and bullied another member of this space. In response to a well-deserved call in over a racist tweet, he encouraged harassment that led to death threats instead of choosing to learn and grow from his mistake. We as the Progressphiles Moderators, professionals in this industry, and as people, absolutely condemn this behavior. It is unacceptable to make people on this list and in this community feel unsafe for calling out wrongdoings. We cannot begin to decolonize our minds if we do not create safety for those fighting against white supremacy. It is on all of us to do this work, but especially to show up for those already doing it and make sure they are safe. By not acting, we are perpetuating the racism and sexism we know exists on this list and in our community at large. As such, we have removed David Shor from Progressphiles.

Think of it this way: the vast bulk of capitulation of the Left to the Authoritarian Left comes from one thing: the desire to avoid being called a racist, the worst word someone on the Left can imagine.

Another of Chait’s examples is Lee Fang, identified as “a left-Wing Intercept reporter.” Fang’s sin was issuing a correction to an oft-misscited statement of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

This ignited a bitter fight on Twitter with Akela Lacy, who also works for the Intercept, and Fang was called a racist. He apologized, and so far has not been fired.

Chait’s last example is that of Tom Cotton’s editorial in the New York Times calling for the military to be inserted into cities where there were demonstrations as a possible means of preventing violence and damage. I thought it was misguided, impractical, and wrongheaded, but black Times staffers made the claim that the editorial put them in danger. It’s a sign of the Times, so to speak, that these claims are actually taken seriously rather than being dismissed with a horse laugh. The paper, which originally defended its decision to publish Cotton’s piece, backed off, put a disclaimer on it, and then fired James Bennet, the editorial page editor.

As I noted, the reasons for backing off on the editorial: its tone and its claims, were hypocritical, since the paper’s Left-wing editorials regularly have “contemptuous” tones and often make factually dubious claims. Chait agrees:

What made this explanation so strange and obviously jury-rigged is that nothing like this standard has ever prevailed at the Times op-ed page before. The Times publishes overstated, contemptuous, and even factually questionable columns routinely. Nor does the paper normally treat minor factual quibbles as grounds to withdraw publication. Driving home the double standard, the Times news story about the op-ed erroneously described Cotton as having called “to send the military to suppress protests,” when he had argued explicitly the opposite. Cotton rejected the “equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters,” and urged, “a majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.” (The story corrected this significant error three days later after critics highlighted the incongruity.)

Cotton’s column broke open a longer-standing debate over whether the Times should run conservative columns. Numerous progressive critics, both inside the paper and out, either frontally oppose inviting any conservatives to contribute, or else hold those columnists to a standard of accuracy and cogency far higher than they hold more ideologically congenial writers, whose factual and logical errors draw little controversy.

. . .The most concerning thing about the Cotton episode is the logic that was given to pull the column in the first place: “Running this puts Black people, including Black @nytimes staff, in danger,” a phrase repeated thousands of times on social media.

The line of reasoning here is perfectly coherent. We can easily imagine a world where Cotton’s op-ed persuades Trump to deploy troops, who then kill protesters and reporters, many of them black. But we could envision a similar sequence resulting from any number of op-eds. Suppose the Times had given an op-ed to an advocate of repealing Obamacare at the crucial moment, persuading John McCain to supply the deciding vote to eliminate it. Millions of people would have lost insurance, and as a direct result, tens of thousands of them would have died.

Many other policy debates have life-and-death consequences: the environment, unemployment, and so on. On nearly all these issues, the brunt of policy failure falls disproportionately on black Americans, who are especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, losing their insurance, being harmed by pollution, and other threats.

Whenever I hear that words make somebody feel “unsafe,” and those words aren’t violations of the First Amendment, I tend to dismiss the argument. Or rather, “feeling unsafe” is not an argument at all, it’s an emotional reaction.

And so Chait decries the conflation of words with actions, one of the problems with the Authoritarian Left. As Chait notes, “The norm of suppressing a belief because somebody saying it makes them or others unsafe has left a trail of absurd or horrifying episodes in academia and elsewhere that many progressives insisted didn’t matter because It Wouldn’t Happen Here. And yet as this norm spreads, its central flaw has never been resolved: Any definition of “unsafe” that aims for a Tom Cotton will hit a David Shor or a Lee Fang.”

Finally, Chait explains why he criticizes the excesses of the Left, and he does so far better than I could have. Yes, I get this kind of criticism all the time. Why do I spend so much time kvetching at the Left when Donald Trump is clearly a more important danger to the Republic? My answer is that you can find criticisms of Trump everywhere in the liberal media, that I share the fear of this narcissistic moron, but I prefer finding a niche that isn’t fully occupied. It’s not interesting to me to simply echo what everyone else says, putting it in my own words. Further, I truly believe that the excesses of the Left—and that includes violence committed by those demonstrating (or joining a demonstration) for a just cause like the murder of George Floyd—will drive moderates into the camp of Donald Trump. So I prefer to do my bit there rather than accomplish almost nothing by adding my voice to the huge choir on liberal media mocking and criticizing the “President”.

Chait is on my side here:

The preconditions that permitted these events [the social-media demonizing and the firing of liberals] to go forward are the spread of distinct, illiberal norms throughout some progressive institutions over the last half-dozen years. When I wrote about the phenomenon in 2015, a common response was to dismiss it as the trivial hijinks of some college students, a distraction from the true threats to democratic values. It certainly was (and remains) true that the right poses a vastly greater danger to liberalism than does the far left. My own writing output reflects this enormous disproportionality. It is also true that the intended (if not always actual) target of the left’s illiberal impulses — entrenched systems of inequality — remain an oppressive force in American life, and that the cause to dismantle them is just.

Nonetheless, it is an error to jump from the fact that right-wing authoritarian racism is far more important to the conclusion that left-wing illiberalism is completely unimportant. One can oppose different evils, even those evils aligned against each other, without assigning them equal weight.

. . . Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives. (Even oppressed people themselves may argue against their own authentic group interest; that a majority of African-Americans oppose looting, or that Omar Wasow himself is black, hardly matters.) Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

I’d add to this what I said above: a third argument against the Left’s illiberal style is that it drives moderates or those on the fence toward the Right. As the Left eats its own, so those in the middle look on and their thoughts turn towards Trump as someone who can stop the madness. This is precisely why the violence of Leftist demonstrators is not a good thing for either the Left or for the country.

And I’ll finish by adding that on top of the examples Chait gives of people demonized for calling out violence, we can probably add Andrew Sullivan, whose New York Magazine column two weeks ago, most likely damning protestor violence, was apparently censored and went unpublished. It’s a fine kettle of fish when you get censored, or called a racist, for simply criticizing violence.

 

Andrew Sullivan on ideological groupthink and wrongthink

June 12, 2020 • 1:15 pm

Although we still don’t know whether Andrew Sullivan’s column was pulled from New York Magazine last week (I suspect it was, though I don’t have an inkling of what it said), he’s back today in spades with two pieces, the first one long and eloquent on “wokeness”—the increasing tendency of the Left to be authoritarian, to purge dissent, and to punish those guilty of crimethink or thoughtcrime.  (The other piece is on Trump’s slide in the polls, in which Andrew says he now thinks Trump will lose in November. I’ll win my bets!).

Click on the screenshot to read about the anguish of a journalist—one becoming more and more liberal with the years—when faced with social-media mobs and a culture that demands that everyone truckle to the prevailing ideology or be cast into perdition (viz., #ShutDownSTEM).

Marvel introduces two new woke superheroes: “Safespace” and “Snowflake”, and the names aren’t mockery

March 25, 2020 • 1:15 pm

Yes, this is from the Daily Fail, but it’s also verified by Marvel themselves in the video below. Yes, along with the rest of journalism, comic strips are getting woker and woker. And the new characters, twins called “Snowflake” and “Safespace”, aren’t mocking the outrage brigade, but are serious names of approbation (they also have fluorescent hair, like all good Social Justice Warriors). Click on the screenshot to read the article.

Oy! An excerpt from the Fail:

Hulk has superhuman strength, Iron Man a powered armour suit. But it seems Marvel’s latest heroes boast the worthiest power of all: They’re super-duper ‘woke’.

The comic book franchise is hoping to appeal to the so-called ‘snowflake’ generation by introducing two new characters – a pair of psychicpowered twins who are ‘hyper aware of modern culture’.

Snowflake, with cropped blue hair and matching leotard, is non-binary – meaning an individual who does not identify as either male or female – and can make snowflake-shaped blades for throwing.

And twin Safespace – a term used to describe an environment free of bias, conflict or criticism – can create pink force-fields for defence against any unkind enemies.

The twins, who will be introduced as part of a series called New Warriors, see their powers as ‘a postironic meditation on using violence to combat bullying,’ according to cocreator Daniel Kibblesmith.

Here they are:

Now you’d think that these Woke Warriors would be greeted with universal acclaim by the Outrage Generation, but of course it’s called the Outrage Generation for a reason:

But the heroes have not been entirely well-received, with some claiming the characters’ names make a mockery of the LGBT+ community and others branding the release a cynical publicity stunt.

One critic described the launch as ‘extremely tone deaf’, while another wrote on Twitter: ‘The Marvel ‘New Warriors’ are so badly designed I thought they were parodies of ‘stuff as many LGBT/minority characters in the main cast as possible’ series.’

If you want to see someone really outraged by these characters, see this YouTube video by “ComicDrake”, who argues that these characters are “insulting and not inclusive.”  He thinks they aren’t really genuine diverse and nonbinary characters, but seem like “parodies”.

Well, dude, listen up: YOU CAN’T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SINCERITY AND PARODY WHEN IT COMES TO THE WOKE! This is indeed Marvel’s idea of how to increase the “diversity” of comic-book characters, and the culture that gave rise to this mentality is “ComicDrake’s” own. He worries that this kind of character plays right into the hands of those who oppose wokeness (i.e., people like me), and he’s right. But it’s not our fault; it’s the pervasiveness of mindless wokeness in popular culture.

Yes, it’s just a comic book, and I can’t get nearly as worked up about it as does “ComicDrake”, but it doesn’t take a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Here’s Marvel’s videos introducing the new warriors: Safespace and Snowflake show up at 2:37. They even have special pronouns! Be sure to watch the whole thing so you can see how well the termites have dined, and how far they’ve burrowed.

Shoot me now, please.

h/t: BJ

Emory student paper urges Syracuse University to “rethink free speech policy”, says anything that doesn’t cause bodily harm should be “free speech”

March 4, 2020 • 1:15 pm

Chalk up Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, as another example of woke students making crazy arguments about free speech—and a cowardly administration at Syracuse University as an example of how not to deal with student-led disruption. As the editorial in the Emory student newspaper below—and an Associate Press article—report (click on screenshot), some students from a “black student-led movement” staged a sit-in in the administration building of Syracuse University about a week ago, protesting racist graffiti and reported bias incidents. The Syracuse administration suspended 30 students involved in the sit-in, as such an act is considered a violation of University policy.

Sure enough, the spineless Syracuse chancellor immediately backed down, and for reasons that aren’t very clear (or heartening):

Syracuse University Chancellor Kent Syverud has lifted the suspensions of 30 student protesters to allow the university to “step back from the edge” and address reports of racist graffiti and other bias-related incidents on campus, he told the university’s governing body.

As Syverud spoke Wednesday evening, a sit-in that began Monday continued inside the administration building on the central New York campus. Students who organized under #NotAgainSU, which describes itself as a black student-led movement, say the university has not properly addressed more than 25 instances of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia reported since the fall.

“These students are afraid they will be arrested and forced out of the building. They have suspension dangling over them. They are concerned about being fed. Enough,” the chancellor said.

Enough? Well, why not just heave them out and put a note in their record, giving them a warning. Then, if they do it again, suspend their tuchases. You don’t let them get away scot-free with such disruption, for you can imagine where that would lead.

The proper response is for the police or administration to give the students a couple of hours to clear out, and then take action if they don’t. You don’t threaten punishment and then rescind it. Perhaps suspension is too severe a punishment, but the administration needs to think in advance about how to respond to such obstruction.

At the University of Chicago, the response would almost certainly be to let the students have a sit-in until, say, the building closes at 5 p.m., and then remove and/or arrest the protestors if they refuse to leave. If they’re physically blocking access to a building, barricading themseleves inside and disabling elevators (causing problems for occupants with disabilities), as happened here four years ago, they’d be arrested and removed on the spot. Those protestors were charged with criminal trespass after firemen disabled the locks and barricades.

What’s interesting is that, along with the Emory students (see below), the New York Civil Liberties Union, a branch of the ACLU, thinks that sitting in is “free speech”. But it isn’t. Disruption is not free speech. The ACLU and its affiliates need to stop walking back the First Amendment. As the AP reported:

The reversal drew praise from the New York Civil Liberties Union, which called the initial response concerning.

“Targeting student protestors with harsh punishment signals a chilling attitude toward free speech,” a statement Thursday from the central New York chapter said.

The Emory students had an even more bizarre attitude about what Syracuse did, arguing that the only thing students should be punished for as “violations of free speech” are actions that “threaten immediate bodily harm.” Shouting down speakers? Okay! Blocking access to buildings and trespassing? Fine! And there should be NO PUNISHMENT!

Get a load of this nonsense in The Emory Wheel (my emphasis):

Syracuse University’s (N.Y.) suspension of 30 students who organized a sit-in earlier this week to protest campus bigotry blatantly obstructed students’ right to free expression. This injustice raises significant questions surrounding the implementation of Emory’s own free speech-related policies. While Syracuse’s administration has since lifted those suspensions, that such harsh punishments were levied in the first place should serve as a wake-up call for all institutions of higher education.

Syracuse had an equal obligation to protect both students’ right to free expression and their safety. No college should abet the trauma of violent demonstration, as occurred during the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally at the University of Virginia or the 2017 riot at at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Given that, only threats of immediate bodily harm should permit universities to assert their authority over protesters. Since the Syracuse sit-in was entirely peaceful, the university’s administration had no grounds on which to interfere.

In punishing the protesters while failing to adequately investigate the incidences of racism, anti-Semitism and homophobia which sparked their demonstration, the university acted unevenly and with considerable bias. Unless the university can prevent further incidents of bigotry, such events will continue. Furthermore, penalizing a peaceful demonstration both constrains political activity and impairs the university’s ability to respond to genuinely violent demonstrations. 

It’s nonsensical thinking like this, which allows students any kind of disruption they want unless it threatens “immediate bodily harm,” that makes me think that, along with the Wokeness Training that’s nearly mandatory for all students entering college in the U.S., there should also be Free Speech Training, which covers stuff like the First Amendment, how it’s been interpreted by the courts, the case for free speech, the history of civil disobedience, and so on.

Finally, as I know in some other colleges, examples of racist graffiti cannot always be taken at face value. The perpetrators of such graffiti sometimes turn out to be members of the very minority groups being attacked, acts that allow them to not only claim victimhood, but to make demands on the college, as they have at Syracuse. When investigations turn up these hoaxes, colleges like Williams simply refuse to publicize those results, which is harmful to everyone and speaks worlds about the cowardice of colleges. The divisiveness and identity politics on today’s campuses make it important to ensure that, before any changes to College policy occur, racist graffiti really were placed by racists. 

Tom Chivers has a theory about the latest Dawkins kerfuffle

February 19, 2020 • 1:00 pm

Tom Chivers is a journalist and science writer who, like me,  was taken aback by the negative reactions to Richard Dawkins’s recent tweet about eugenics. (Remember? Richard said eugenics would “work” in the sense of changing population means in humans, but immediately added that he was against it.) Now, at UnHerd, Chivers has proposed a “theory” to explain the dichotomous reaction. (It did seem pretty dichotomous, with lots of people understanding what Richard was trying to say but a big number demonizing Dawkins for “favoring eugenics.” There were a few, like me, who understood what Richard was saying but thought he should have said it in a longer piece rather than vomiting it out on Twitter. Or not said it at all.)

First, an earlier tweet from Chivers in which he expressed the rudiments of his idea:

 

Click on the screenshot below to read Chiver’s theory, which is his:

So Chivers’s idea, which is his, is that there are two types of people: the “high-decouplers”, which, in a statement like Dawkins’s, can easily separate the “is”s from the “ought”s. They can see that he’s making a statement about the malleability of human traits to artificial selection and, at the same time, realize that this doesn’t mean Dawkins favors such intervention.

Then there are the “low-decouplers”, which couple Dawkins’s “is” statement with his “ought” statement. (I’d prefer to call the groups “couplers” and “uncouplers”.) These people embed Richard’s “eugenics would work” statement in a political and cultural milieu, and are unable to separate them. Ergo Richard, by saying “eugenics works”, is somehow justifying Nazism. That isn’t an exaggeration, as you can see if you’ve followed the pushback.

As an example of a low-decoupler, I posted a tweet from a scientist who called Richard a “clown” who was “supporting eugenics” and deserved to be denounced. When I asked in my post if that scientist actually read what Richard wrote, I was denounced by the person (a woman) as a “sexist asshat”. (The exact wording was “So in addition to ‘Fuck eugenics’ and “Fuck dawks,’ I’d like to add, Fuck Jerry Coyne you sexist asshat”.) That, I realized after reading Chiver’s piece, was double “low-decoupling”: not only was the person unable to decouple Dawkins’s “is” from his “oughts”, but was unable to decouple my mild criticism of her from the presumption that I was a “sexist” (and an asshat, too). What would imply I was a “sexist” beyond her own sex?

So here’s Chivers’s take (a quote, not the full piece):

I have a rule that I try to stick to, but which I break occasionally. That rule is “never say anything remotely contentious on Twitter”. No good ever comes of it. Arguments that need plenty of space and thought get compressed into 280 characters and defended in front of a baying audience; it is the worst possible medium for serious conversations.

. . . The analyst John Nerst, who writes a fascinating blog called “Everything Studies”, is very interested in how and why we disagree. And one thing he says is that for a certain kind of nerdy, “rational” thinker, there is a magic ritual you can perform. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y.”

Having performed that ritual, you ward off the evil spirits. You isolate the thing you’re talking about from all the concepts attached to it. So you can say things like “if we accept that IQ is heritable, then”, and so on, following the implications of the hypothetical without endorsing them. Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

. . .That’s what I think was going on with the Dawkins tweet. Dawkins thought he’d performed the magic ritual – “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice” =  “By X, I don’t mean Y.” He is a nerdy, high-decoupling person, a scientist, used to taking concepts apart.

But many people reading it are not high-decouplers; they hear “eugenics” and “work” and immediately all of the history, from Francis Galton to Josef Mengele, is brought into the discussion: you can’t separate the one from the other.

. . . But I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. Sometimes the ritual fails, and the spirits break through the warding circle.

Chivers also explains that Dawkins’s tweet, which seemed to appear out of nowhere, was actually aimed at Andrew Sabisky, a nasty piece of work and a former advisor to Boris Johnson (he appears to have just resigned over racist remarks).

At any rate, Chivers gives some other examples of quotes from people who were demonized because the proper decoupling wasn’t done. Some of those quotes are harder to parse, and Chivers seems to have some sympathy with the victims.  As he says “I think the decoupling thing makes me understand a bit more why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry.”

Well, the “coupling/decoupling” dichotomy is useful, I think, but hasn’t helped me understand more deeply why Dawkins’s tweet got people so angry. They were angry because they deliberately misinterpreted what he said—either that or they couldn’t read or were just thick. What puzzles me is why so many people were and are so eager to demonize Dawkins. Jealousy is one reason, I suppose, but I don’t think that quite covers it. After all, there are psychological reasons for a seeming inability to decouple that the theory doesn’t cover.

Chivers argues that it’s easier for scientists to decouple because they’re “used to taking things apart,” but I don’t buy that, either. It is those who are enraged by Dawkins—and they include many scientists, who have demonized him for his tweet)—or are determined to bring him down, who can’t decouple in this case. How bright do you have to be to understand that Richard was talking about the efficacy of artificial selection and not that it should be used in humans? Is that so hard—especially when Richard immediately explained what he meant in other tweets?

I will probably use the designations of “couplers” and “decouplers” in the future, as it’s good shorthand for people who link (or don’t link) things that shouldn’t be linked. But I don’t think that giving these groups names helps us understand them or their motivations any better.

Stanford students walk out of talk about whether repealing DACA is legal

February 13, 2020 • 9:15 am

The episode I’ll discuss this morning doesn’t really constitute deplatforming, since the speaker got to speak. It’s not disinvitation, either, as the speaker spoke and his invitation wasn’t rescinded. Nor is it “censorship” in the formal sense because nobody prevented the speaker from speaking. So let’s call it “disruption of a talk”, which is nearly as bad because it prevented people from hearing a speaker whose views contravened those of Left-wing students. Well, it’s not even that since the speaker in this case, Texas Solicitor General Kyle Hawkins, was supposed to be presenting both sides of the argument for whether DACA (the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy) was legal.

A wee bit of background: DACA offers those who came to the United States illegally as children a path to getting a work permit, though not citizenship. (The latter is the purview of the DREAM Act, which has never been passed.) DACA was established by President Obama in 2012, and its remit expanded two years later. Texas and 25 other states sued the government to block the expansion, a federal judge agreed, and an appeal to the Supreme Court gave a divided verdict (4-4) which meant the lower-court ruling stood.

That meant that although the expansion of DACA was blocked, and still is, the original DACA remains in force. Republicans oppose DACA in general, but I’m in favor of it as it’s a reasonable way to deal with those who came to the U.S. as minors and has had beneficial effects on the well-being of immigrants.

But the original and still-in-force DACA is still the subject of legal dispute, hinging on whether Obama had the executive power to create such a program that may really be the purview of Congress. One judge (in Texas) ruled in 2018 that the program is “probably illegal” but left it in place pending further litigation.

The upshot is that there’s a debate about the legality of DACA and whether a President has the power to institute it; and the lawsuits are ongoing.

This report, from the student newspaper The Stanford Daily, gives details about how Hawkins’s talk, which was supposed to give both sides of the issue, was disrupted by students (click on screenshot):

The nature of the disruption was twofold. First, a large number of students showed up, requiring the talk to be moved to a bigger room. They were also holding up posters, which I see as disruptive (it disrupts the speaker and blocks audience view.) When the audience was moved, and after Hawkins’s talk began, three-quarters of the students walked out, which also denied those who wanted to hear the talk, but couldn’t get in, a chance to listen. The walkout was organized by the Stanford Latinx Law Student organization in conjunction with 11 other student groups. (The walk-outs of course didn’t hear the talk either.)

It seems clear that (although Hawkins is probably opposed to DACA, he did give some arguments on both sides, presumably because they couldn’t find a professor to debate with him. From the paper:

Initially speaking before a packed room of students holding posters reading “No human being is illegal” or “Everyone is welcome here,” Hawkins prefaced his talk by saying that, since there was no planned rebuttal for the event, he would be arguing both sides.

But Hawkins’ track record aligns him with DACA’s legal opponents, and he spent the majority of his lecture explaining the substantive and procedural ways Trump could repeal DACA — emphasizing that he was making a purely legal argument.

“[Trump’s motion] did not say DACA is a bad policy,” he said. “It did not say that DACA was unworkable. … It just says that DACA is unlawful.”

Sidestepping questions of the value and impact of DACA, however, was exactly what those who walked out opposed.

“Purely legalistic discussions of DACA ignore the human element, which must be front and center,” SLLSA and the other groups wrote in a joint statement. “We cannot afford to disregard the presence and importance of DREAMers in all places, including here at SLS.”

But apparently Hawkins did argue both sides, though perhaps not with equal vehemence:

“DACA is unlawful for the same reason that DAPA was unlawful, according to the fifth circuit,” Hawkins said.

The arguments against DACA assert that former President Barack Obama did not have the power to institute the measure in the first place. DACA “confers on someone a status Congress would otherwise deny,” Hawkins said, including work authorization and lawful presence.

Pivoting to a pro-DACA legal argument, Hawkins said that the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) grants the executive branch some leeway in enacting the U.S.’s body of immigration law.

“What the folks on the right need to grapple with is that the executive has discretion in enforcing the terms of the INA,” he said.

Well, DREAMers aren’t yet in existence, and DACA’s legality is still under debate, so one would think that, given the pending litigation, a discussion of its legality would be of interest. In other words, let the damn speaker talk!

But the students didn’t consider the issue even worth debating. A few excerpts show that view, including the claim above that the lecture was on an “intellectually cheap and morally affronting topic.” “Morally affronting topics” are, however, precisely those that are most crucial to debate! Here’s a student whining about how the talk was inappropriate:

Some who walked out of the event felt DACA’s legality isn’t even a question at all.

“It’s incredibly unfair that my fellow students have to face these extra burdens and then be reminded of them in school,” first-year law student Zoe Packman said. “We shouldn’t be discussing the legality of our student population. It’s not a valid question, there is no question there.”

Yes it is a valid question. Even if I hold, as I do, the position that DACA should be in place; I have no idea whether it’s legal. (The Congress could make it legal, but fat chance of that with a Republican Senate!) I have no sympathy for students like Packman who take it upon themselves to be The Deciders—to pronounce on what questions shouldn’t even be discussed at their school.

The Federalist Society, which sponsored the talk, said that they’d invited 11 professors to give a rebuttal to Hawkins’s talk, but none agreed. The protestors said that this was an inadequate “effort.” Well, for crying out loud, why didn’t they organize their own counter-discussion? (Apparently there was to be no Q&A after Hawkins’s talk.) I guess they can’t be arsed to do that kind of work. Instead, they just assert that debating the legality of DACA is not a valid question.

These are Stanford students, probably from both the Law School and the undergraduate school, and they are among the intellectual elite of America. Yet they’re extraordinarily censorious, and even afraid of hearing certain arguments. One would think that law students, at least, would appreciate the First Amendment. Yes, Stanford is a private school, but the arguments for freedom of speech still obtain. But they haven’t penetrated the crania of many Stanford students.

 

Anti-woke spoof censored in Psychology Today

January 18, 2020 • 11:30 am

Yesterday at Psychology Today, a website that can be pretty dire, Lee Jussim, a professor and social psychologist who happens to be chair of the Psychology Department at Rutgers, published an “Orwelexicon”:  a spoof of a genuine Woke Lexicon published by another journal. For spoofing wokeness, Jussim had his piece taken down by the Psychology Today.

First, though, we should note that Jussim has street cred in social psychology. According to Wikipedia,

He has published and spoken extensively on scientific integrity and distortions in science motivated by politics, stereotype accuracy, prejudice, bias, self-fulfilling prophecy, and social constructionism. His works have won professional awards: his 2012 book Social Perception and Social Reality: Why Accuracy Dominates Bias and Self-Fulfilling Prophecy won an American Association of Publishers’ Prize for best book in psychology, and his 1991 book Social Belief and Social Reality: A Reflection-Construction Model received the Gordon Allport Prize for Research in Intergroup Relations. During his recent 2013–2014 sabbatical, he worked with colleagues at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in the Behavioral Sciences and co-founded Stanford’s Best Practices in Science group.

Jussim’s piece was meant as a response to a woke and humorless lexicon published a year ago in BMJ, the new name for the former British Medical Journal. That piece resides behind a paywall, but you can see a run-on transcript here, or a judicious request might yield you a pdf:

Here are some of the neologisms created by Choo, DeMayo, and “Glaumoflecken” (obviously a coward who won’t reveal his/her/hir name). They’re neither clever nor funny, they can be perceived as somewhat misandristic in that they single out white males for special criticism (they could never do this with other groups which, of course, are perfect compared to white males), and this kind of woke stuff doesn’t belong in a medical journal, which is simply flaunting its virtue.

(I do like “Ovalooked, though!)

Well, if you think this kind of mockery is suitable for a scientific journal, more power to you. But apparently it rubbed Jussim (as it rubs me) the wrong way, and he responded by putting up his own “Orwelexicon” mocking the woke mentality that produced the BMJ glossary. You could have seen Jussim’s piece yesterday if you clicked on the screenshot, but what you get if you do that now is the second screenshot:

The article has disappeared!

Jussim is angry about this, as his Orwelexicon (a clever name) was a spoof. The journal simply removed it:

But you can still see it! You can see it at the Imgur link here, and I also have a transcript and screenshot. Here’s Jussim’s introduction and a few terms he coined:

In an article published in BMJ, a major biomedical journal, Drs Choo & Mayo presented a “Lexicon for Gender Bias in Academia and Medicine.”  They argued that “mansplaining” was just the “tip of the iceberg” and so they coined terms such as:

Himpediment: Man who stands in the way of progress of women.

and

Misteria: Irrational fear that advancing women means catastrophic lack of opportunity for men.

This Orwelexicon is offered in a similar spirit of capturing biases, albeit quite different ones, that pervade academia.  It is also a bit different, at least sometimes, because these words often capture the Orwellian disingenuousness with which some terms are used in academia.

A few examples of neologisms—psychological syndromes—from Jussim’s original Orwelexicon:

If you want to see all Jussim’s examples, go to the Imgur site above.

Well, we all know that every venue of mainstream or liberal journalism (at least those I read) is becoming more woke, so it’s not that surprising that Psychology Today would take down this post mocking Wokeness at the same time that BMJ publishes an article that mocks male behavior. Granted, men in academic situations often behave in a peremptory, sexist, or domineering way, but the medical lexicon is grating and cringeworthy, as well as being a form of racism/sexism that would not be tolerated if directed at any other group—unless all other groups behave perfectly and in a non-tribalistic way.

And, at any rate, Jussim’s spoof is not directed at any ethnic or gender group in particular, but at the pathologies of Wokeness itself. It didn’t deserve to be censored, as it does make fun of things that need to be mocked.

We’ll see if Psychology Today puts it up. Jussim is hopeful; I’m not. For if they reinstate the piece, the Woke will hound the journal to death, calling for the editors’ resignations, and probably for Jussim’s as well. So it goes.