Category: documentaries

A new Free Press film: “American miseducation”

January 31, 2024 • 12:00 pm

The Free Press has a new 20-minute film called “American miseducation”, centered on pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses.  Given the pro-Israeli stand of that site, the tenor of this film is not surprising: its thesis is that aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators are not just anti-Zionist, but largely antisemitic, and on some campuses are intimidating and even attacking Jewish students, who have no “safe space” of their own. (The attack on the Cooper Union library, shown in this film, is an example.)

The film is made by Olivia Reingold, a Free Press staff writer whose bona fides are these:

Olivia Reingold co-created and executive produced Matthew Yglesias’s podcast, “Bad Takes.” She got her start in public radio, regularly appearing on NPR for her reporting on indigenous communities in Montana. She previously produced podcasts at POLITICO, where she shaped conversations with world leaders like Jens Stoltenberg.

And this is her intro to the film:

That was one of 14 pro-Palestinian rallies I’ve attended since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Like the Rockefeller Christmas tree, the activists behind these events consider innocuous institutions to be their enemies: Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Cancer Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

They insist that their aim is to liberate Palestinians, and that they are not antisemitic. But attend enough of these demonstrations and you’ll start to see the swastikas. Some people have looked me in the eyes and said that Israelis are the new Nazis, the prime minister of Israel is the new Hitler, and Palestinians are the new Jews. Out of the scores of people I’ve spoken to, only two demonstrators told me that Israel has a right to exist.

The word Jew is rarely uttered by these protesters. Instead, people hurl terms like Zionist, settler-colonialist, and occupier. They speak of academic theories like decolonization and intersectionality—concepts many told me they learned at elite institutions like Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.

I decided to go to the source of these ideas: The American campus, where I spoke to scores of anti-Israel activists and dozens of Jewish college students across the country.

I asked: How did an ideology once restricted to the ivory tower come to inspire masses of Americans chanting on behalf of Hamas and Yemeni Houthis? How did Gen Z, the most educated generation in U.S. history, become sympathetic to terrorism? And, most fundamentally, how did our colleges come to abandon the pursuit of truth in pursuit of something far darker?

The result is The Free Press’s first-ever documentary, American Miseducation.

The questions she asks in her last paragraph aren’t really answered, although Critical Theory seems to be a good solution: the oppressor-narrative combined with some undercover anti-Semitism. But the movie poses its own questions.  Is there really a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism?  Should antisemitic or anti-Palestinian speech be deemed hate speech?  Who is being most targeted by campus demonstrations: the pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian students? (I’ve seen both groups claim that they are being oppressed.)  My sympathies have been made clear on this site, but I’ll withhold them for now, for you should just watch this short movie.

After seeing this movie, Malgorzata told me glumly. “The good life for American Jews is coming to an end. . . . they are now more or less in the same situation that German Jews were in after Hitler came to power in 1933.  The antisemitism started slowly, but then grew over time until it became too late escape.”  As to what kind of anti-semitism will grow in America, she said, that cannot be predicted.

“The Reformers”: a new three-part documentary on the “Grievance Studies” hoaxers

May 7, 2023 • 12:45 pm

Surely all of you know the trio who perpetrated the “Grievance Studies Affair“, exposing the abysmally low standards of ‘scholarship’ pervasive in some fields of the humanities.  Wikipedia has a big article on it, but I’ll just give two paragraphs:

The grievance studies affair, also referred to as the “Sokal Squared” scandal, was the project of a team of three authors—Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose—to highlight what they saw as poor scholarship and eroding criteria in several academic fields. Taking place over 2017 and 2018, their project entailed submitting bogus papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat, and sexuality studies to determine whether they would pass through peer review and be accepted for publication. Several of these papers were subsequently published, which the authors cited in support of their contention.

. . . Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose wrote 20 articles that promoted deliberately absurd ideas or morally questionable acts and submitted them to various peer-reviewed journals. Although they had planned for the project to run until January 2019, the trio admitted to the hoax in October 2018 after journalists from The Wall Street Journal revealed that “Helen Wilson”, the pseudonym used for their article published in Gender, Place & Culture, did not exist. By the time of the revelation, 4 of their 20 papers had been published; 3 had been accepted but not yet published; 6 had been rejected; and 7 were still under review. Included among the articles that were published were arguments that dogs engage in rape culture and that men could reduce their transphobia by anally penetrating themselves with sex toys, as well as Adolf Hitler‘s Mein Kampf rewritten in feminist language.[2][4] The first of these had won special recognition from the journal that published it.

Mike Nayna, an Aussie filmwriter and director, is putting out a three-part series of this documentary, which he calls “The Reformers.” The first episode, 13 minutes long, is available for free here on his Substack site “The Process”. You can access the other episodes on other parts of that site, but I’d recommend subscribing if you want to watch all three parts. I’ve watched the first part, and want to see the rest, but I think I’ll first make a donation. Click below or on the link above to see the first episode; the rest are on Nanya’s site.

Things get plenty weird around 11 minutes in as Peter and Richard Baldwin (who loaned his name to the enterprise) confect one of the crazy articles.

Now I know there was a lot of outrage elicited by this hoax, with the most common response being, “Well, every field has some crazy papers.”  Yes, ’tis true, but nearly as crazy or as numerous as in “studies” areas of the humanities. I personally found it not only amusing, but also edifying: it showed that Alan Sokal’s hoax, which involved only the journal Social Text, was not a one-off.  And I’ve put up some pretty wild stuff on this site, like papers about feminist glaciology and the racism of pumpkins, yogurt, and Pilates. But now that the rot has been exposed, I see no point in making further hoaxes.

Anyway, have a look if you’re intrigued.

 

h/t: Colin, for alerting me to the videos