Category: wokeness

University of Austin: The anti-woke University circles the drain

January 19, 2026 • 9:45 am

The University of Austin (UATX), not to be confused with the University of Texas at Austin, was founded in October, 2021 as a sort of heterodox university, one where all viewpoints could be represented and debated. In this sense it was a counter to “elite” universities like Harvard and Princeton, whose faculty are almost entirely liberal and where free speech policies are sometimes abrogated. Wikipedia says this about the founders:

The University of Austin was conceived in May 2021 when venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale, St. John’s College president Pano Kanelos, British–American historian Niall Ferguson, and journalist Bari Weiss met in Austin. The proposal was publicized six months later in an article by Kanelos in Weiss’s newsletter Common Sense (which has since evolved into The Free Press).

Founding faculty fellows included Peter Boghossian, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Kathleen Stock. Other advisors included former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen, and former president of the American Enterprise Institute Arthur Brooks.

In November 2021, the university’s website listed Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, Gordon Gee, Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen as advisors to the university.

On November 11, 2021, Robert Zimmer announced his resignation from the university board, saying that UATX had made statements about higher education that “diverged very significantly from my own views”.[26] Shortly thereafter, Pinker followed suit. UATX apologized for creating “”unnecessary complications” for Pinker and Zimmer by not clarifying [sooner] what their advisory roles entailed.[28]

The founders and founding faculty are indeed a mixture of left- and right-wing people, and, with proper guidance and care, as well as a judicious selection of faculty, UATX had the possibility of turning into a decent alternative to other high-class but left-oriented schools.  That was the original aim. Sadly, it did not happen.

I sensed trouble with Steve Pinker and our President, the late Bob Zimmer, resigned in November. There must have been something about the ideological leaning of the university—the feeling that it was founded to follow an antiwoke ideology rather than just allow all viewpoints to be erred—that turned off Steve and Bob. Here’s a FB post by Steve in response to a new article in Politico about UATX:

I don’t know why Bob Zimmer resigned, as he wasn’t explicit about it except to say, as the article notes, ““The new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”

According to this new article in Politico by author and criminal justice professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice Evan Mandery,  UATX entered the drain in the spring of 2025 when the right-wing nature of the school became explicit. And now more advisors and faculty have resigned, and it looks as if the school (which is unaccredited, but might be in two years) is doomed. But the trouble started almost immediately when the school was founded. Read about this mess by clicking the screenshot below:

Here are some of the people involved in UATX (indented quotes are from the article):

Kanelos identified 32 people as trustees, faculty members and advisers to the new university including Jonathan Haidt, the NYU professor whose work Kanelos evoked in proclaiming that UATX would produce an “antifragile” cohort with the capacity to think “fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively”; Summers; Pinker; the playwright David Mamet; Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University; computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman; authors Andrew Sullivan and Rob Henderson; the journalists Caitlin Flanagan, Sohrab Ahmari and Jonathan Rauch; Stacy Hock, an investor and philanthropist; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a conservative, Dutch politician-turned-writer known for criticizing Islam’s treatment of women, and who is married to Ferguson.

The list leaned right, to be sure. Loury, who is Black, zealously opposes affirmative action. Mamet had called Trump “the best president since Abraham Lincoln.” Hock served as chairwoman of an organization called Texas GOP 2020 Victory. Several of the academics had experienced backlash for taking conservative positions. These included Dorian Abbot, a geophysicist who’d had a planned lecture at MIT on extraterrestrial life canceled over his views on DEI; Peter Boghossian, who’d resigned from Portland State University in part because of the institution’s response to his sending hoax articles to academic journals; and University of Sussex professor Kathleen Stock, who’d faced protests over her allegedly transphobic views, which she disputed.

I’m not sure if Boghossian and Stock can be said to “lean right”, but never mind. But also on the list were Pinker, Strossen, and Haidt, all of whom see themselves as classical liberals.

Resignations began early, as the school’s ideological antiwoke agenda was manifest from the outset.  Others who resigned were Geoffrey Stone, Vickie Sullivan, Andrew Sullivan, Heather Heying, Nadine Strossen (former head of the ACLU), Jon Haidt, and Jonathan Rauch. This gutted the advisory board of most of its well-known liberals. Heying said she resigned because she didn’t think the university’s vission was “sufficiently revolutionary,” and Pinker emailed Mandery with further explanation:

“Dissociation was the only choice,” Pinker told me in an email. “I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education.” Furthermore, Pinker added, “UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.”

That was pretty much my view as well. If you look at the curriculum page of UATX, you’ll see that science is pretty much limited to math and data analysis.  As Mandery notes, the curriculum was in places bizarre. He reproduces the syllabus below, saying”

Indeed, the syllabus I reviewed for a class called “Intellectual Foundations of Science II” covered a range of topics unusual for a science class including “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief.” A student who’d taken the course shared a slide with me on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — and said that the class had been told that IVF but not abortion could be consistent with the Catholic belief about ensoulment.

Enlarge this if you want to see part of the science curriculum, best described as a “dog’s breakfast”. Francis Collins on God? People from Colossal Biosciences on “de-extinction”? There is apparently no introduction to basic biology, but just a bunch of topics of current popular interest. This is no way to get a biology education.

Here is what’s represented as a slide from the class above. This does not belong in a biology class; it’s theology:

(from Politico): A slide on “ensoulment” — the principally religious question of when a soul enters the human body — was shown in the class. | Obtained by POLITICO

Another quote from the article:

The poor quality of the science offerings had bothered Heying and Pinker. “Others thought I was the token liberal,” Heying told me, “but I came to understand myself as the token scientist.” In an email, Pinker wrote, “They should have hired a widely esteemed scientist and proven program builder to set up their science division.”

As far as I can see from looking at the curriculum, they don’t have a decent one that could undergird a quality liberal-arts education.  The goals of UATX at the outset were admirable, but the ideological motives of the founders eventually warped the school:

Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.

They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.

There are a lot of other issues discussed in this long article, issues like how it dealt with a sexual harassment violation, abrogating the school’s own rules for how to adjudicate violations.  This all culminated in a meeting on April 2 of last year when conservative founder Joe Lonsdale laid down a right-wing law for UATX:

. . . in the afternoon, all of the professors and staff were summoned, quite unusually and mysteriously, to a closed-door meeting. It had been called by Joe Lonsdale, a billionaire entrepreneur who’d co-founded the data analytics company Palantir Technologies with Thiel. Together with Ferguson and the journalist Bari Weiss, Lonsdale had been a driving force behind the creation of UATX and was a member of the board of trustees. But he wasn’t often present on campus, and it was almost unheard of for a member of the board to summon the staff, as Lonsdale had.

. . . . . “Let’s get right into it,” he said. Then, with heightened affect, Lonsdale explained his vision for UATX — a jingoistic vision with shades of America First rhetoric that contrasted rather sharply with the image UATX had cultivated as a bastion of free speech and open inquiry.

. . . “It was like a speech version of the ‘America love it or leave it’ bumper sticker,” one former staffer told me, and if you didn’t share the vision, the message was “there’s the door, you don’t belong here.” Like many of the people I spoke with for this story, the staffer was granted anonymity for fear of reprisal. “It was the most uncomfortable 35-to-40ish minutes I’ve ever experienced. People were shifting uncomfortably in their seats.”

. . .In an email I obtained that was sent to [President] Kanelos, the provost Jake Howland, the university dean Ben Crocker and a fellow professor, Morgan Marietta, Lind related what Ferguson had told him:

“According to Niall, under the constitution of UATX Joe Lonsdale, as chair of the board, had no authority to tell those of us at the meeting:

“That all staff and faculty of UATX must subscribe to the four principles of anti-communism, anti-socialism, identity politics, and anti-Islamism (this is the first time I heard of these four principles);

“That ‘communists’ have taken over many other universities and that he, Joe Lonsdale, would stay on the board for fifty years to make sure that no ‘communists’ took over UATX (the identity politics crowd and some Islamists are a threat, but the Marxist-Leninist menace in 2025?)”

Lind said when he asked for definitions of “communists” and “socialists,” he’d been told they included anybody who didn’t “believe in private property” and “hate the rich.” This, he wrote, struck him “as a libertarian political test excluding anyone to the left of Ayn Rand.” Lonsdale had said that the board would make a case-by-case determination on whether “New Deal liberals” would be allowed to work at UATX. Lind said that he considered himself “an heir to the New Deal liberal tradition of FDR, Truman, JFK and LBJ.” He was “in favor of dynamic capitalism in a mixed economy, moderately social democratic and pro-labor, and anti-progressive, anti-communist, and anti-identity politics.”

According to Lind, Londsdale repeatedly said that if the faculty weren’t comfortable with what he was saying they should quit.

“So I quit and I walked out,” Lind wrote.

A lot of the other resignations, including from notables like Strossen, Rauch, and Haidt, followed. There were emendations of the schools’ constitution, giving the President more power, and the Provost resigned, presumably after told he’d be fired.

Now things are in a mess. I sure as hell wouldn’t send a student to UATX to get a good education, for what they’ll get is a spotty but an anti-woke education. Yes, I am by and large anti-woke myself, but I am also pro-liberal-education, and by “liberal” I don’t mean “Left-wing’ but “liberating the mind”—through free inquiry.

At the end Mandery has two questions:

The first: Where was Bari Weiss? Many of the people I interviewed told me about internal conversations and shared internal emails. Weiss, who remains on the board of trustees, was almost never present in the conversations as they were related to me, and while I saw many emails on which Kanelos and Ferguson were copied, I never saw any including Weiss.

Weiss, one of the founders, was the person whose presence brought in many donations, but she seems to have absented herself from UATX. This may be because she’s burdened with running both The Free Press and CBS News, but she did not respond to a request for a comment.  But wait! There’s more!:

The second question: Was UATX a hard-right project from the start? Based on my reporting, I don’t think it was. I was struck by the sincerity of the commitment to free speech and open inquiry from so many of the people with whom I spoke. A few were Trump supporters, but many more were best identified as anti-woke moderates or liberals. The university’s saga has a strong sense of historical contingency — that it could have gone quite differently had some high-leverage moments gone otherwise. A notable example is the episode surrounding Dan’s alleged violation [the sexual harassment charge] and expulsion, which several former staffers and faculty suggested was exploited by the Straussians as evidence of dysfunction in their successful second coup attempt.

So UATX, in its very first full year, was eroded by the very thing it tried to avoid: pervasive ideology in the curriculum:

When students returned for UATX’s second year, it was difficult not to notice the drift. The Tuesday night speaker series, at which attendance is mandatory, leaned unmistakably rightward — guests included Patrick Deneen, originalist judge Amul Thapar and Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University business school professor who’d written Hannah’s Children, about the 5 percent of American women who have five or more children.

As Mandery says, “The pluralists had lost.” Indeed.  Nobody took care to forge a proper curriculum, and the right-wing bent of those who didn’t resign is forcing the school into a conservative version of Harvard—except it’s not nearly as good as any of the “elite” colleges that UATX aped.

My prediction is that the whole enterprise will fail. And if it doesn’t, it will never be a good place to send students, even though admission is based purely on meritocracy and tuition is free.  Other schools may be full of left-wingers, but most of them don’t impose their views on the students in class, and it’s still possible to get a good education.

Mommas, don’t let your babies grow up to be UATX students.

A “progressive” phrasebook

January 11, 2026 • 11:20 am

Anna Krylov called my attention to this articl at the site The Gadfly, which appears to be run by Frederick Alexander—someone I’ve never run across before. His article gives ten phrases associated with wokeness, four of which I really detest. I’ll put them all below the screenshot (click it to read the article), and perhaps you can guess which four curl the soles of my shoes.

Alexander’s phrases are in bold, and all of his words are indented. My few comments are flush left. He begins with an introduction about how the burgeoning of DEI after George Floyd’s death in 2020 has led to embedding certain phrases in woke language. Some of them are well familiar to me, while others are not.

Part of the intro:

It’s tempting to look back on those events as if they were a curious aberration, a moment of hysteria brought about by lockdown cabin fever. Today, it’s common to hear that “woke is dead” – and it’s true that many DEI programmes have been shut down or rebranded. The finger-wagging sanctimony has been toned down a few notches, too.

But what remains is the language: a distinct and unmistakable lexicon with a long half-life. This is the fallout from a blast we thought was long behind us. DEI no longer marches through institutions with a fanfare, but it operates as background radiation. Wave the Geiger counter over policy small print or the latest HR initiative, and you’ll hear the familiar crackling of progressive orthodoxy.

The language has insinuated itself into corporations and public bodies across the Western world, becoming almost invisible through constant repetition. Phrases that sound benign on the surface mask a cold system of enforcement that continues to reward fluency in Newspeak while punishing dissent. Taken together, they form a closed moral system – one that begins with empathy and ends with coercion.

Here are a few phrases you’ve probably heard before.

You can read Alexander’s full explication at the site; I’ll give just a sentence or three that he says about each one. And I’ll add my own short take:

1.) “We’re on a journey.”  The world’s most overused corporate metaphor is also a favourite of institutions haemorrhaging money on failed DEI initiatives. Bud Light went on a journey with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in April 2023 and ended up in corporate hell. The brand lost its spot as America’s top-selling beer, two marketing executives were put on leave, and the whole debacle cost a billion dollars in lost sales

That one I’m not familiar with, nor am I familiar with #2:

2.)  “Bringing your whole self to work”. Silicon Valley invented this one. The idea was that workers would bring their creativity and passion to the job. Instead, they brought their politics and personal grievances.

It turns out there’s only really a problem if your “whole self” doesn’t align with “correct thinking”. Don’t bring your whole Christian self to work – the one who opposes abortion or thinks polygamy is a bad idea. That won’t go down too well. Think national borders might be a good thing? That whole self had better stay away, too. A gender-critical whole self? Don’t be silly. Best put all those whole selves back in their box, or wave your career goodbye.

3.) “Brave conversations. . . We’re talking about “courageous dialogue” with your line manager following an apparent “microaggression”. Turns out you need more training in how to think and when to declare your pronouns.

These conversations tend to begin with an admission of privilege, followed by an acknowledgement of harm, and conclude with a commitment to growth. Actual conversation – the kind where people disagree and minds change – never happens. That’s the wrong sort of bravery. The proper kind is where you confess to thought crimes you didn’t know existed.

I haven’t heard that one, either. Where have I been? After all, I’ve been on campus for decades.

4.) “Educate yourself”.  This is a phrase professional activists and scolds deploy when they can’t defend their position. It’s the go-to for transforming intellectual laziness into moral superiority.

What “educate yourself” really means is this: read the approved texts so as to arrive at the conclusions I agree with – what we used to call indoctrination. Any other outcome is seen as proof of moral and intellectual deficiency.

I’ve used #4 myself, but only when faced with obtuse commenters who make arrant misstatements, usually about evolution. And I don’t use it too often, though of course all of us in academia have heard it used in exactly the sense that Alexander means.

5.) “Psychological safety.” Today, it means an environment where nobody can disagree with progressive orthodoxy without being invited to an HR struggle session. The safest spaces, it turns out, are wherever difficult questions are never asked. Feeling “unsafe” is now what happens when we challenge someone’s views on immigration or question whether men can become pregnant. JK Rowling has spent years being told her defence of women’s spaces makes trans people “unsafe”.

Of course we’ve all heard of “safe spaces,” which is apparently what “psychological safety” means. I’ve never heard that term used, though.

6.) “Lived experience.”  This one refuses to die, which is a tragedy because few ideas on this list have wrought so much chaos and misery as the idea of “lived experience”. A phrase that transforms subjective feelings into unassailable truth, lived experience is invoked again and again to shut down “problematic” questions like “why are you trialling experimental puberty blockers on children as young as 10?”

This is how clinicians at Tavistock were silenced when they raised concerns about rushing children into medical transition. They were told they were “invalidating young people’s lived experience” of gender identity. Evidence-based medicine lost to feelings-based ideology. The Cass Review finally reintroduced rigour, but only after a decade of children used as test subjects.

Or consider Iranian women protesting forced veiling. Western feminists have dismissed them while deferring to the “lived experience” of those women who defend the hijab as empowerment. When evidence becomes inconvenient, personal testimony is invoked as epistemological authority, leaving empirical reasoning nowhere to go.

Several times this one has appeared on my “words and phrases I detest” posts (I need to make more of these). First of all, it’s redundant, since all experience is lived. (Is there such a thing as “unlived experience”?) But, more important, it suggests an alternative form of personal truth, a form that is fundamental to wokeness, is derived from postmodernism, and is explicitly antiempirical.

7.) “Equity, not equality”. Equity used to refer to the value of shares issued by a company. Now it refers to equalising outcomes rather than opportunities. The switch transformed Martin Luther King’s dream into its nightmare opposite.

That’s a terse entry but a true one.  One has to be careful not to mistake the terms.  The problem with ensuring equity is that different groups may have different preferences, which will create inequities despite equal opportunities. Therefore, if you see uneqaual representation of groups, you have to suss out the causes before you start mentioning bigotry, misogyny, and other causes based on prejudice.

8.) “Decolonizing the curriculum.” “Decolonising the curriculum” is largely about treating Western knowledge as inherently suspect because it’s Western. Ideas are judged not by whether they’re true but in terms of their provenance. Plato or Locke are “problematised” rather than argued with. Rejecting classical liberal principles in favour of progressive ones is “challenging power”.

In short, “decolonising the curriculum” is a licence to swap scholarship for grievance. It tells students what they’re meant to feel about the civilisation that built the university they’re attending.

That’s a strong statement, but again largely true.  Certainly non-Western material is unduly neglected in some courses, more often in the humanities than the sciences, but beware of calls to “decolonize” an entire curriculum, particularly in STEMM.

9.) “Be an ally.” Allyship used to mean supporting a cause. Now it means performing endless penance for demographic characteristics you can’t change. The progressive ally must publicly confess privilege, declare solidarity, and accept instruction from activists without question.

It’s the “without question” part that bothers me. I am in agreement with the aims of many “progressive” causes, but don’t necessarily buy into the whole ideology or bag of tactics that go along with them. I prefer just to state where I agree or disagree rather than saying, “I’m an ally” or telling someone else to be one.

10.) “Impact over intent.” A lesser-known phrase, these words ensure your guilt is inescapable. It doesn’t matter what your intentions are; only how others feel about your actions. What’s that you say? You meant no harm? Irrelevant. Someone felt harmed, and that’s all that counts.

I’ve not heard that exact phrase before, but I’m well familiar with what it means and how it would be used. Two examples are the suspension of Professor Greg Patton for saying a Chinese word that sounded superficially like a racial slur, and the firing of an art-history professor at Hamline University who showed her students (with warnings) two famous Muslim paintings that depicted the visage of Muhammad.

I don’t have much to add to what Alexander and I have said above, but wanted to add Alexander’s pessimistic ending, noting first Alexander’s arguable claim that the phrases are the provenance mostly of the privileged.

. . . . much of the language persists because the people who use it pay no price for the harm it causes. HR directors still have jobs and diversity consultants still bill by the hour. The costs are absorbed by those with the least ability to navigate the new moral codes.

A decade from now, these phrases will sound dated, and eventually they’ll fade away. But others will take their place – a vocabulary already incubating in universities and carrying the same assumptions.

This is how ideology colonises institutions in a post-religious age: through a moral language that redefines virtue, reshapes norms, and renders dissent unspeakable long before it becomes the object of cancellation.

Note the emphasis on the moral certainty of the progressive ideologues, something we’ve talked about recently.

Sam Harris and John McWhorter: Is wokeness dead?

January 8, 2026 • 9:15 am

In this shortish (23-minute) video, Sam Harris and John McWhorter discuss whether wokeness is finally dead.  The short answer is “nope.”  It may have lain down, but it refuses to die.

The YouTube notes (there’s a transcript you can see as well):

Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about language, ideology, and moral certainty. They discuss the rise and persistence of “wokeness” and DEI, the legacy of George Floyd’s death, the role of social media in amplifying moral panic, how identity shapes perceptions of Israel-Palestine, the linguistics of Donald Trump, the rise of casual speech, conspiracy thinking, positions McWhorter has reconsidered, and other topics.

John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University and writes a column for the New York Times. He earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and is the author of several books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Word on the Street, and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is also the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley.

When asked whether the damage of wokeness is unfixable, McWhorter (who wrote Woke Racism ) notes that academics continue to pass on wokeness—not mainly to undergraduates but to graduate students. This ensures, he thinks, that woke ideology will be perpetuated because in that way it gets imbued in future professors as well as in academia as a whole. McWhorter cannot imagine anything will change this pathway. Asked by Harris whether Trump isn’t uprooting DEI from schools, McWhorter suggests that DEI isn’t really disappearing, but simply going underground, branded with a new name. (I agree; that is happening everywhere, including my own school.)

McWhorter teaches music appreciation at Columbia, and discusses a claim by Philip Ewell that music theory is inherently racist, a view that McWhorter considers absurd, and yet Ewell is greatly lionized. In response, Harris muses about whether the defeat of the woke Kamala Harris was the “high water mark” of the ideology.  McWhorter responds that while “high woke” has indeed has peaked (McWhorter means by that “an eternal and punitive battle against whiteness”), the same fury and lack of reason has shifted, and can be seen in the pervasive support for Hamas among progressives as well as in “trans issues, especially surgery and sports”. Ergo, the old woke ideology is being applied to new issues, but with the same concentration on power issues.

How to solve it? McWhorter’s own solution is simply to call attention to this stuff over and over again, but in writing rather than via podcasts—though he finds that tedious given the variety of his interests.

At the end, Harris asks McWhorter what the elites, the intelligentsia, and the MSM “got wrong” in response to the tsunami of emotion and ideology that followed the death of George Floyd.  I’ll let you hear his answer in the last five minutes.  Thrown in at the end is a description of a rupture that McWhorter had with his erstwhile podcast pal, Glenn Loury.

McWhorter and Harris pretty much agree that, for the nonce, wokeness is here to stay. Though it may manifest itself in new ways, the underlying ideology (derived from postmodernism) of power differentials and “personal truths”, most notably in emphasizing inequities between blacks and whites, shows no signs of disappearing.

So it goes.

h/t: Bat

Social Justice wrecks the Sierra Club

November 14, 2025 • 10:00 am

This happens over and over again. It happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It happened with the ACLU. It happened with the Audubon Society. And now it’s happening with the Sierra Club. What is happening? An organization with a narrowly defined but admirable mission cannot resist the ideological Zeitgeist, and embraces social justice precepts that are not universally accepted. The organization becomes riven with controversy, and it erodes, becoming damaged. (This also happened with Scientific American, remember?)

The NYT from a week ago tells us how this is happening to the Sierra Club, which has lost money and membership after deciding to branch off into Social Justice Warriorism. Read about it by clicking the headline below, or find the article archived here for free.

I’ll put the upshot under bold headings, which are mine. Indented bits come from the article:

Why the club was good. 

The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 to protect the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, but it grew into a giant of American environmentalism.

It helped expand national parks, keep dams out of the Grand Canyon and establish Earth Day.

In 2016, the club was at the height of its success, leading what many in the green movement consider the most successful environmental campaign put on by anyone in the 21st century: “Beyond Coal.”

Its secret was focus, according to activists involved. The club put its energy behind the single, measurable goal of closing all of the country’s 500-plus carbon-spewing, coal-fired power plants. Armed with more than $120 million from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, they used lawsuits, petitions and protests to convince regulators and utilities that coal plants were too dirty and expensive to keep operating.

The move to social justice:

During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.

. . .It drove away longtime volunteers who loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. Many hard-core supporters felt the Sierra Club was casting aside the key to its success: It was an eclectic group of activists who had one, and sometimes only one, cause in common.

The club hired Mr. Jealous, its first Black executive director, that year to stop that slide, but his tenure accelerated it as accusations of sexual harassment, bullying, and overspending piled up.

The club became one in a string of “resistance” groups from Mr. Trump’s first administration that arrived at his second already exhausted from liberal infighting.

“It’s almost like uprooting a sequoia and converting it into an ax handle,” said Aaron Mair, a former board president.

Things got worse:

At the same time, the club asked its supporters to agree with positions farther from the environmental causes that had attracted them in the first place.

It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.

After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.

The club even turned on its own founder, John Muir, with Mr. Brune saying the environmental icon had used “deeply harmful racist stereotypes” in his writings about Native Americans and Black people in the 1860s.

You  can see part of the language guide below and a link to the whole thing, which is simply ludicrous.

They even came down on Israel:

In 2022, a group of union members asked the Sierra Club to “follow [its] values of antiracism and justice” and cancel sightseeing trips it operated in Israel, in protest of the country’s treatment of Palestinians.

“Palestine is an environmental issue from our standpoint,” Erica Dodt, the president of the Progressive Workers’ Union, which includes Sierra Club employees, said in an interview. “People are a huge part of our environment.”

The club postponed the trips. But Sierra Club officials said the club heard a backlash from donors including Mr. Bloomberg, the major funder of “Beyond Coal” who also gave to humanitarian causes in Israel. His staff declined to comment. The Sierra Club said he is still a donor.

Within days, the Sierra Club reversed itself and announced more trips to Israel.

If Palestine is part of the Sierra Club’s remit, and that includes “people” because humans are “part of the environment,” then there is nothing that does not become part of the Club’s mission!

The outcome: the Club lost members and money. and membership fractured:

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.

And this year, as the Trump administration returned better organized and better prepared than in its first term, the Sierra Club was the opposite. While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.

Here’s the NYT chart showing the decline in “champions” (volunteer helpers or people the club endorses, but see below for the decline in membership), as well as the rise in expenses, which are now higher than donations:

They surveyed the members, who aren’t happy:

In late 2020, the club surveyed its dues-paying members, its most hard-core supporters. The members said they supported racial justice, but when asked to choose among priorities they ranked climate change first, and racism tied for last.

More than half of members also said they were worried that the club’s shift toward social justice “will detract from its core mission of protecting the environment” and alienate conservatives, according to a copy of the survey obtained by The New York Times.

Well, it already has detracted from its core mission, which is always the problem. Once again we see an organization flaunting its virtue when it should be institutionally neutral except for issues affecting its core mission. But it was not like that, and lost out.

Then culture began permeating the organization, with allegations of sexual misconduct arising. In response, the Club instituterd a system to “discipline its volunteers”, and some volunteers got investigated without even being told why.  The deficit continued to increase and they chose as Executive Director Ben Jealous, who ran the NAACP and “promised employees to make the Sierra Club ‘the most progressive and inclusive employer in the movement, if not the nation.'”.

That, of course, is the kiss of death. Jealous fired 10% of the staff but also hired several “longtime associated as high salaries,” something that smacks of nepotism. Two of those salaries were over $300,000, which is simply ridiculous for the Sierra Club. Its “champions” declined by 60%, and dues-paying members were down by 27% from 2021. Even Jealous himself was accused of sexual harassment, and left the organization:

Is the Sierra Club moving away from Social Justice and back to its core mission? Don’t be ridiculous. Since Jealous left, the Club has shown no signs of reverting to its focus on strictly environmental issue:

In recent weeks, supporters who clicked on the group’s website for “current campaigns” were presented with 131 petitions, some out of date, like calls to support clean-energy funding that Mr. Trump has already gutted, or to support a voting-rights bill that died in 2023.

Patrick Murphy, the club’s current board president, who has helped lead the group since 2020, said in an interview that he could not name any decision he regretted.

“I have a hard time pinpointing how I believe we should have made different choices,” Mr. Murphy said. “And I’m happy with where we are today.”

It’s amazing that in the face of the Sierra Club falling apart, Murphy sticks to his guns. Seriously, they should adopt an institutional neutrality policy, which I think would make the group hew to what it’s good at. But they won’t, and they’ll learn their lesson the hard way.

Finally, here’s a bit from Nellie Bowles’s latest TGIF in The Free Press. The Sierra Club has an Equity Language Guide!

My favorite part: The Sierra Club put out the Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide. It tells staffers to avoid words like lame. Fine. But it also tells them not to celebrate clean energy jobs unreservedly because fossil fuel jobs are more likely to be unionized, so maybe we’re pro-coal now. Maybe we’re sort of a coal lobbying shop, actually. The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide says not to use the words vibrant or hardworking because they have racial overtones (I’ve never heard that one. Seems kinda racist.). And then there’s this list of words to avoid, which, for an activist organization, is really hard. Especially when trigger itself is a trigger word, triggering them into a new dimension of triggerdom.

Imagine explaining this to the guy who lives in a cabin in Yellowstone and whose job is to check water levels in creeks.

Que sera, sera.

The erosion of medical journals

October 28, 2025 • 11:30 am

Of all the papers in the special issue of the Journal of Controversial Ideas on censorship in science, the one below is perhaps the most important, as the censorship being imposed can cause permanent damage to humans. I’ve described this censorship before: it involves papers on or critiques of extreme claims of gender ideologues, especially those touting the benefits of what’s called “affirmative care” (adolescent dysphoria—> doctor on board prescribes puberty blockers almost immediately—> hormones, surgery, and gender transition). The recent history of the field, documented in the first paper below, involves repeated attempts to allow questionable claims to stand in the literature. Two examples of this are the unsupported claim that affirmative care prevents suicide, and the release of the paper by Johanna Olson-Kennedy et al, which was held back because the results (puberty blockers did not improve mental health) were not in line with what author thought gender activists wanted to see.  The paper by Cohn below (click to read), summarizes many of these forms of censorship or distortion.

Here’s the abstract:

The integrity of the gender medicine research literature has been compromised, not only by censorship of correct articles, but also by censorship of critiques of articles with unsupported (for instance exaggerated), misleading or erroneous statements. Many such statements concern the evidence base, which can be evaluated rigorously using a key component of evidence-based medicine, systematic reviews of the evidence. These reviews currently find there is limited to very little confidence that estimates of benefit from (and sometimes harm from) medical gender intervention, that is, puberty blockers, hormones and/or surgeries, are likely to match true outcomes. Several medical societies and articles in medical journals have been claiming otherwise, misrepresenting the evidence base as a whole and/or relying upon unsupported or non-representative individual study findings or conclusions. For example, high likelihood of benefit and low risk of adverse outcomes from medical gender interventions are often claimed, while less invasive alternative treatment options are either omitted or mischaracterized. Other unsupported, erroneous or misleading statements occur when studies minimize or omit mention of significant limitations, or report findings or conclusions not supported by their own data; these are then sometimes quoted by others as well. In addition, correctly reported studies are sometimes misrepresented. Critiques which attempt to rectify such statements are frequently rejected. Some examples are presented here. Such rejections have stifled scientific debate, interfering with the continual scrutiny and cross checks needed to maintain accuracy in the research literature. Currently, erroneous and unsupported statements circulate and repeat between journals and medical society guidelines and statements, misinforming researchers, clinicians, patients and the general public.

If you want a three-page summary of the paper above, which you really should read in toto if you’re interested in gender medicine, read the article below (click headline to read) gives a terse summary.

I can’t summarize the first paper in detail, and you really should read it for yourself. I can, however, give a few quotes from Linehan’s summary on his Substack, which is a bit choppy (quotes indented below). Linehan begins by citing the paper above:

‘Censorship of Essential Debate in Gender Medicine Research’ has the dullest possible title for what it reveals. In yet another example of trans ideology destroying everything it touches, the most prestigious journals in medicine are refusing to publish corrections to papers that contain demonstrably false claims about gender medicine.

The author, J. Cohn, didn’t set out to write about censorship. She tried to correct errors in published papers. When that didn’t work, she described what happened. She found that multiple systematic reviews (the gold standard in evidence-based medicine) have found low or very low-certainty evidence for the benefits of medical gender interventions. This includes puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. ‘Low certainty’ means there’s limited confidence the estimated effects will match what actually happens to patients.

The Cass Review, published in 2024, found the evidence for paediatric interventions “remarkably weak.” Several other systematic reviews found the same for patients under 21 and under 26.

None have found that these interventions reduce suicide risk.

Meanwhile, major medical journals keep publishing papers claiming the opposite.

Papers in JAMA, the New England Journal of Medicine, and Pediatrics have variously claimed that gender-affirming medical interventions are:

  • “Widely recognised as essential, evidence based, and often lifesaving”
  • Known to “clearly improve health outcomes”
  • Associated with “demonstrated health and well-being benefits”
  • Linked to regret rates “less than 1%” or “exceedingly rare”

The regret claim is particularly bold given that the studies cited have major flaws. The often-quoted Bustos review included 27 studies, of which 23 had moderate-to-high risk of bias. All included studies suffered from premature follow-up, significant loss to follow-up, or both.

And one more bit:

Medical guidelines are supposed to work like this: researchers conduct systematic reviews of all available evidence, assess its quality, and make recommendations that match the strength of that evidence. Strong evidence gets strong recommendations. Weak evidence gets weak recommendations or no recommendation at all.

That’s not what happened here.

The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement recommending gender-affirming care wasn’t based on systematic reviews. A subsequent analysis found its cited references “repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them.”

The Endocrine Society guidelines make strong recommendations based on evidence they themselves rate as low or very low certainty. They don’t explain why.

WPATH commissioned systematic reviews, then interfered with them. After publication, they dropped all but one minimum age recommendation (for phalloplasty) under pressure from the Biden administration and the AAP.

This whole field is rife with a form of advocacy so extreme that researchers not only hesitate to publish results that go against the preferred ideological narrative, but also repeatedly distort studies that criticize affirmative care.

This is not the way science is supposed to be done, but it’s what happens when ideology begins to erode the norms of science. This of course is not new: it’s what happened with the Lysenko affair in Soviet Russia (documented in our paper, Jussim et al.), when ideological distortion (and outright cheating) ultimately killed millions of people.  Nobody’s claiming that kind of toll for gender medicine, but there is still a palpable human cost to sloppy research.

h/t: Joolz

Teslas and virtue flaunting

October 26, 2025 • 2:41 pm

I have been waiting for several weeks for this first car—a Tesla sedan (or whatever you call it)—to show up on my block again. It finally did, as I wanted to photograph it.

First, the back (license plate number redacted):

And, just to the left of the plate is this sticker:

For zero emissions AND against fascism. How could you ask for more virtue?  It reminds me of Greta! But what is that sticker for? It could be saying either or both of two things:

1.)  I recognize that Elon Musk is insane.

or

2.)  Please do not scratch up or key my car.

It could mean both, of course, as they are connected.  The second alternative is okay as it is just there to protect the car, but the first rubs me the wrong way  I am no fan of Elon, but I do not go parading that “virtue” all over town. Plus the term “fascist”, like “Nazi”, is being thrown around so widely that it has lost all its meaning.

And think of the poor owner of this vehicle parked right across the street: a $100,000+ Tesla Cybertruck. Is it doomed? I am keeping an eye on the unstickered truck, which is often there, just to see what happens to it.  If nothing, then alternative 2) becomes less plausible.

Matt Ridley discusses our anthology (and the wokeness of science) in The Spectator

September 26, 2025 • 11:30 am

In one of the most aggressive and misguided examples of “whataboutery” I’ve been involved with, quite a few people criticized Lawrence Krauss’s anthology The War on Science (in which Luana and I have an altered version of our Skeptical Inquirer paper), for we had the temerity to show that science was being injured by attacks coming from the Left. OMG! What we should have published, said the blockheads, was a book showing how the Right, instantiated by Trump’s attacks on universities and grants, was doing more damage to science.

And indeed, in the short term that may well be the case. But to exculpate the Left is ridiculous, especially because their attacks are not dependent on who is President. The “progressive” infection of science may last.much longer, especially since it’s being passed on from professor to student, and has now metastasized to many scientific journals and societies. “No, no!”, cried the miscreants, “You should have gone after Trump, and Trump alone!” Well, since this website has concentrated largely on the excesses of the Left, since I consider myself on the Left, readers already know the fallacies of this whataboutery. Everybody and their brothers, sisters, and comrades are already criticizing Trump’s attack on science, and I have been among them. But where else but in this book (and this website) will you find a compendium of criticism about how the Left harms science?

Enough said. I have paid little attention to the critics, for none of them have engaged with the book’s arguments. “Look!”, they shout, “There’s even a chapter by Jordan Peterson. That’s enough to make you throw the book in the fire.” Yes, I find the inclusion of Peterson unfortunate, and his message almost impenetrable, but you don’t damn an anthology because of one weird piece, or because you don’t like the politics of some of its authors. No, you must criticize its contents. 

At any rate, Matt ‘Ridley has just mentioned the anthology in The Spectator, and actually seems to like it (cue the attacks on Ridley’s politics).  But what really angers him is the Left-wing attacks on science, the very subject of the anthology.

You can read his original article here, but it’s paywalled. Clicking below will take you to a free archived version.

Ridley discusses several issues; I’ll concentrate on what he says about the book (not all that much) as well as the general “wokery” of science, one theme of the anthology that presumably got Ridley revved up:

My, how we all laughed. Thirty years ago the physicist Alan Sokal hoaxed a social science journal into publishing a paper ‘liberally salted with nonsense’ (in his own words) that ‘flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions’. Its title alone gave away the joke: ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.’

Little did we in the truth-seeking enterprise which is real science realise that verbose and vapid social deconstruction was coming for us too. In a new book, The War on Science, edited by the astrophysicist Lawrence Krauss, 31 scientists and scholars lament the corruption of their field by left-wing ideological nonsense. Whereas once a book with this title would have raged at the conservative right pushing creationism and sexism in the teeth of truth, now it is exposing the woke left pushing identity ideology and intersectionality at the expense of reason.

In 2022, Nature, at the pinnacle of the scientific establishment, published an editorial stating that it would refuse or retract papers that ‘could reasonably be perceived to undermine the rights and dignities of an individual or human group on the basis of socially constructed or socially relevant human groupings’. The editors went on to reassure readers that they would consult ‘advocacy groups’ before doing this, just as they once had to consult popes before denying that the Earth circles the sun. This was an open invitation to activists to censor science they did not like. Sure, scientists always had their prejudices, ideological biases and blind spots, but almost by definition regarded those as bad things to be minimised. Here now was a manifesto for deliberately injecting bias into science.

. . . But surely biology was safe, let alone chemistry and physics? How naive we were! Gender became the new front line. Journals were falling over themselves to declare sex a spectrum, despite the fact that all animals divide neatly into a sex with large, immobile gametes and a sex with small, mobile gametes – and there are no other sexes, just some rare developmental anomalies. Deviate from this new Lysenkoism by saying there are two sexes and you will be excommunicated.

Richard Dawkins once pointed out in a tweet that a mostly white woman had been pilloried for ‘identifying as black’, which seemed puzzling given that race is a spectrum in a way that sex is not. Why is it all right for a man to identify as a woman but not for a white person to identify as black? Just for raising the issue, he was retrospectively stripped of his humanist of the year award by the American Humanist Association. They accused him of implying ‘that the identities of transgender individuals are fraudulent, while simultaneously attacking black identity’.

. . . Hilariously, the ideologues have painted themselves into an awkward corner in their attempts to decolonise mathematics. They demand non-western slants on algebra and algorithms, which are words of Arabic origin, while rewriting exam problems to replace adding up grocery bills (which ‘carry the ideological message that paying for food is natural’) with calculating how many aboriginal people can fit in a tipi, which is patronising to the point of racism. One right-on mathematician admitted this change was insulting, but only ‘because indigenous people would not divide themselves in the way stated in the word problem. Relational and spiritual factors would dominate’. Meanwhile, New Zealand now requires schools to teach indigenous Maori ‘ways of knowing’ as equivalent to scientific ones. So creationism is fine if brown people do it?

. . . Many scientists continue to do good work unperturbed by this revolt against critical thinking. But the sheer volume of funding, publishing and attention that is being siphoned off into this pathology represents a massive opportunity cost. Grants are being spent, papers retracted, scientists sanctioned, hiring practices altered and peer reviews corrupted, while scientists are self-censoring to prevent their cancellation. Four-fifths of students say they self-censor, many more than at the height of McCarthyism.

. . . Science has always behaved like a cult to some extent, enforcing dogma and persecuting heretics, but it has grown far worse with wokery. Science as a philosophy is still great, but science as an institution is about as true to its philosophy as the church was under the Borgias, and as ripe for reformation.

I have crossed swords with Ridley before, in some critical review I wrote of one of his books (I can’t even remember what it was about), but I’ll cut him a break.  Not because he’s on our side, but because he’s right. I’ll let the blockheads go after hm because he doesn’t engage in “whataboutery” in this review.  Note that he doesn’t discuss the book’s contents much, but uses it as a springboard to vent his own take, which is what book reviews often do, and, said H. L. Mencken, was really the purpose of a book review.