Should We Keep Sacred Cows, or Slaughter Them?

I say slaughter. But hey, it's a free country. Or is it?

On my way out of town for a story yesterday, I read “My Brush With Trump’s Thought Police” in the New York Times. Nobel laureate and former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz described having his publicly funded lecture on “The Road to Freedom: Economics in a Good Society” canceled:

A core element of freedom is the ability of each person to live up to his or her potential. A liberal education is essential for this to happen, because it helps students develop their skills and capabilities to the utmost, frees them from shibboleths and enables them to think critically. But this kind of approach is threatening to authoritarianism, which wants to impose particular views on a nation’s citizens.

In the case of the Danish lecture series, simply discussing diversity, equity and inclusion was apparently deemed threatening to the administration, which asserts that those qualities, by their very nature, are discriminatory against a majority of the population. But Mr. Trump’s “1984”-ish thought police have not stopped at D.E.I. Climate change and gender are other terms that are being expunged.

I almost spit out coffee at the last line. Probably no three terms in the English language are more associated with groupthink-truisms or “shibboleths” than D.E.I., climate change, and gender.

We saw (and are still seeing) a generation of people be censored or lose jobs or careers for failure to properly salute those terms. Seemingly half now write on Substack. Matt Yglesias was bounced from a site he co-founded, Vox, because he was one of 150+ people to sign the Harper’s Letter on open debate alongside gender villains J.K. Rowling and Jesse Singal. Biologist Colin Wright, Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker, Princeton classics Professor Joshua Katz, the black former DEI director for De Anza Community College Tabia Lee, data scientist David Shor (fired for tweeting a study questioning the efficacy of violent protest), and countless academics forced to write “diversity statements” (the most potent and outrageous symbol of the mandated-thought era) only begin the list of other casualties. You could fill a congressional district with people punished for lack of fealty to DEI and gender “shibboleths.”

As for climate change, see the punchline below. It’s incredible that the New York Times would have the gall to talk about someone else acting as climate change “thought police.”

The Denmark lecture episode, which as Stiglitz notes is news over there, is a textbook example of why the snowballing pile of Trump constitutional controversies is more complicated than is being let on. Some administration developments are genuinely terrifying. Kristi Noem saying habeas corpus is a “constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people” was legit pucker-inducing. Speaking of Denmark, Donald Trump probably shouldn’t be musing about seizing Greenland (even though, again, I can’t help find the level of trolling involved in sending J.D. Vance there funny). Trump and Marco Rubio should probably compare notes before giving contradictory answers about who is and isn’t entitled to due process. On the other hand, some of the alleged “attacks on free speech” turn out upon closer inspection to mean the opposite of what’s been represented, as in this case:

I once admired Joseph Stiglitz as someone who spoke with unusual candor for someone occupying lofty institutional roles. As a young reporter in Moscow in the nineties I was shocked by the I.M.F. and his World Bank, which to my novice eyes seemed to be pursuing disastrous policies, plunging Russia into debt while enriching a handful of gangster-oligarchs to act as a bulwark against Communism. Stiglitz showed guts in also publicly calling out these neoliberal policies as short-sighted, while correctly warning about blowback. I think he means what he says, which is what makes this depressing. We’ve been in a monocultural boil for so long, even some more independent thinkers can’t feel the heat anymore.

If Stiglitz thinks cutting federal funding for DEI and “gender ideology extremism” represents the “erosion of American democracy,” I have to conclude he doesn’t know the definition of either democracy or “shibboleth.”

This country was long forced to worship a list of sacred cows (about race, gender, climate, equity, and so on) before getting fed up and voting to slaughter them. The effort to “impose particular views,” as Stiglitz puts it, isn’t happening now. That was done over a decade of constant budgetary initiatives, with nary a peep from media, leaving most of bureaucratic America choked with mandatory thinking at every level. That was the outrageous free speech violation, not this (admittedly clumsy) effort to cut its funding. It’s the difference between feeding sacred cows and slaughtering them. America isn’t a theocracy. We can’t have sacred cows. But something like a religion still runs deep, thanks to a generation of propaganda.

In the last Trump presidency the Times ran a piece called “The Ignorant Do Not Have a Right to an Audience.” It quoted Herbert Marcuse’s infamous screed against the “Tyranny of the Majority,” warning of a world where “the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one.” The author, a professor named Bryan Van Norden, pooh-poohed John Stuart Mill’s notion that dismissing some ideas as valueless “is to assume our own infallibility.” After all, with certain issues, aren’t we infallible? Can’t we be sure Ann Coulter has radically wrong ideas about immigration and a “D-list actor” like Jenny McCarthy is wrong to criticize “actual scientists” about vaccines? One passage was wild:

Jordan Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, has complained that men can’t “control crazy women” because men “have absolutely no respect” for someone they cannot physically fight. Does this adolescent opinion deserve as much of an audience as the nuanced thoughts of Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, about the role of “himpathy” in supporting misogyny?

I’m not sure I agree with Jordan on that one, but the idea that converations have become less civil because there’s less threat of getting punched (whether due to gender or the other speaker is online and named Spelunk94) isn’t completely crazy. More important was the choice of Peterson in general. He’d recently been cut from YouTube for criticizing Canada’s C-16 bill, which mandated adherence to new gender theologies. His employer, the University of Toronto, warned that failure to adhere to its guidelines (including the respecting of pronouns) wouldn’t be tolerated, and he was denied a federal grant shortly after. Unlike Trump, the Canadian government didn’t blab about reasons for the denial. They just did it, saying “past funding is not a guarantee of further funding.” Whether abroad or under prior regimes, other politicians are much more clever than Trump about how they chill speech, one of two reasons that faction still scares me more.

As for “Himpathy,” the Times ran a piece by progenitor and professor Kate Manne called “Brett Kavanaugh and America’s ‘Himpathy’ Reckoning” (the Times was big on “reckonings” for a long while). Manne defined himpathy as “the inappropriate or outsize sympathy extended to male perpetrators of misogyny and sexual violence over their female victims, who are often erased in the process.” In essence, himpathy is the crime of extending too much leeway to the accused. Manne wrote:

The real problem is that the people Mr. Trump feels with and for are most frequently powerful men who have been credibly accused of serious crimes and wrongdoing… In the case of Judge Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump feels sorry for a man accused of sexual assault while erasing and dismissing the perspective of his female accusers.

I believe sexual assault accusations need to be fully investigated. Still, we consider people innocent until proven guilty for a reason. The Kavanaugh case was not a Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein situation. It was a fraught, emotional charge based on old accounts, and he ended up being confirmed precisely because accusers went out of their way to avoid “himpathy.” Kavanaugh’s second accuser recanted and his third, Julie Swetnick, told a story on NBC so wild (Kavanaugh spiked drinks so girls could be “gang raped” by a “train of boys”) that it made even some Democratic Senators skeptical. The whole affair ended up in legal, journalistic, and political scandal, demonstrating why presumption of innocence is necessary.

The Times in other words told us Jordan Peterson, who I believe was right to criticize the state for trying to impose controversial (well, wrong) ideas about biology on the country, is ignorant and doesn’t deserve audience, but the concept of affording the accused less than full presumption of innocence does. This leads to the second reason the other crew is still more frightening than Trump. Instead of blundering over the First Amendment en route to deporting immigrants or trolling the AP, what the sidelined political establishment was after, for years, was very concept of free speech or multiplicity of opinion.

In a few cases the Biden Administration’s flouting of the First Amendment was at least superficially utilitarian (as in the pressure on platforms to decrease vaccine resistance), but in a broader sense both the “anti-disinformation” movement and the related “moral clarity” concept in journalism were about the idea that in many cases one reality is so obvious that other opinions or contentions don’t need air. That’s what Wesley Lowery meant in another Times reckoning, “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” an early jeremiad against what we used to call objectivity.

Lowery made his case in part by quoting journalist Alex Jones of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, incidentally a major player in the “anti-disinformation” complex. Shorenstein director Joan Donovan was the intellectual standard-bearer for “deplatforming is working,” the idea that cheered everything from the removal of Trump from platforms to deamplification or removal of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, and Canada’s The Blaze to social media to the takedown of 70,000 Twitter accounts “associated with QAnon.” (Again, people forget how extreme this all got.) In any case, Harvard’s Jones wanted to redefine objectivity to eliminate “letting advocates pretend in your journalism that there is a debate about the facts when the weight of truth is clear.”

Lowery went on to explain he’d been on a crusade to get newsrooms to “abandon the appearance of objectivity” in favor of “being fair and telling the truth,” as best you can. Lowery noted, this describes the subjective “Gonzo” style, which ironically is what I grew up under and was the default mode at Rolling Stone, where Hunter Thompson invented the idea.

But you can’t have Gonzo news sections! People have to at least see other sides, other points of view. Until about ten minutes ago, we were told over and over that could no longer be the standard. There were too many areas in which One Truth was obvious. Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Mass Communication did a study whose results came out in 2023, saying “truth-seeking news media must move beyond whatever ‘objectivity’ once meant.” Former San Francisco Chronicle Emilio Garcia-Cruz, who famously said “objectivity has got to go,” advocated a form of coverage by consensus, according to the Washington Post:

Garcia-Ruiz is among a vanguard of print, broadcast and digital news leaders who have increased their newsrooms’ diversity and created new avenues of communication among their reporters and editors to discuss issues and coverage. Some have assembled affinity groups or caucuses of staff members — for women, Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans and LGBTQ+ people — and involved them in newsroom decisions.

This weird zone in which colleagues now had a say in whether or not your coverage was politically acceptable took hold everywhere and was a big reason, again, that people like Glenn Greenwald, Lee Fang, and Yglesias ended up on Substack and other alternative channels. The press in a short time became a vehicle for policing the aforementioned sacred cows. When the Wall Street Journal dared to print a group letter signed by 16 prominent scientists questioning some presumptions of climate science back in 2012, the Times, Forbes, ThinkProgress, the Union of Concerned Scientists and others bound into action to denounce the paper, in an early example of immune-response reporting. Ten years later, academics who violated “shibboleths” were lucky to speak at all, or keep their jobs.

Some of the academics said things that seemed offensive. University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy reacted to the George Floyd killing by saying “Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege.” Tenured professor Amy Wax at UPenn was sanctioned for saying, among other things, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half.” Concordia College professor Dr. Gregory Schultz was suspended for complaining school officials, in searching for a new leader, had “been publicly announcing their determination to have a president who exhibits a ‘demonstrated belief in and commitment to equity and inclusion.’” In 2023-2024 there began to be demands that professors be fired for pushing material in the other direction, but the bulk of suspensions, sanctions, and especially rejected grants came when academics violated sacred cows and objected to having, for instance, DEI officers in science departments or mandatory diversity statements.

There’s a view out there, increasingly popular with liberal-ish intellectuals, that Donald Trump’s election means “woke” lost or “anti-woke has conquered woke,” as New York’s Ross Barkan (a writer I like) put it. With respect, this totally misunderstands the scale of what we have lived through and still are living through, since the election hardened far more minds in realms like academia than it changed. Whatever “woke” is (I hate the word), it’s been at most a niche concern that got press because it was so absurd (Beethoven is racist! We need rainbow pedestrian crossings!). The idea that because most cancelings are on hold because the White House might withhold funds means the upper class cultural revolution is over is myopic. The real damage was done through all those years of indoctrination, leaving us with an intellectual class that increasingly resembled a Mullah State, with doctrinal ideas about race, gender, climate, equity, and a dozen other things.

In some ways we’re in the best possible situation. Trump is heavy-handed enough that efforts to establish, say, permanent “viewpoint diversity” committees will probably be challenged and fail. But cutting the cord on funding for DEI or gender and “misinformation” research has to be allowed to take place. Stiglitz himself has long recognized the dangers of the academy and the state being too intermingled. He worried about the academy becoming dependent and vulnerable to being cut off, but it should worry about that exact situation. When people vote to end ideological subsidies, that isn’t an “erosion of democracy,” as he says. That is democracy, and if even courts say otherwise, they’ve got it wrong.