Revisionist-History In Real-Time

 by Steven Gussman

        Universities have transitioned to (and in fact, created) woke ideology over the past ten years. Many have noted that Jews are considered a form of, "white oppressor," in the Marxist “intersectionality” table which leftists use to figure out who, "gets to win," a given argument. This is because many western Jews are fair skinned (whereas western Muslims are typically darker skinned), Jews are relatively successful in the West, and because leftists graph their Marxist view of Good-Palestine versus evil-Israel onto their views of Jews, generally. Nevertheless, in the wake of Hamas' October 7^th terror attack on Israel, many of us were shocked by the outpouring of support for Palestine, and even Hamas (and hatred towards U.S. ally, Israel), in Western cities, campuses, and among friends and acquaintances in our lives. All of this is likely the result of a mix of immigration policy and the ascension of the aforementioned "critical theory" in high culture, in which every issue is given a simple, pre-baked oppressor-oppressed narrative.

        For half a decade, the "Intellectual Dark Web” or “IDW” has been opposing this "successor ideology", with a major focus on the importance of free speech. When three top university presidents—from Harvard, U Penn, and MIT—were called before the U.S. Congress to speak on the anti-semitism seen on their campuses, they each, (U Penn's Liz Magill with a self-satisfied smirk and glee) repeated to Congresswoman Elise Stefanik that it was not a violation of their schools' codes of conduct to, “[call] for the genocide of Jews,” on their campuses because they allegedly hew closely to the First Amendment to The Bill Of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, the coherence of "IDW" response frayed. Jonathan Haidt, Nicholas Christakis, Michael Nayna, Robert George, Iona Italia, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, and myself signaled that we actually agree with the Constitutional response outside of the context that we all know free speech is not protected on these campuses, and that straight/white/male/Jews are the only groups you can commit "microagressions" against (much less call for the genocide of). Eric Weinstein effectively called for the Presidents' resignations, calling their schools, “revolutionary Marxist justice fingerpainting daycare for sociopaths.” Elon Musk and Jordan Peterson took the position that calling for the genocide of the Jews does indeed constitute harassment, with the latter calling for resignations. Gad Saad added to all of this that the resignation of these three presidents (without actually winning the battle of ideas) will do nothing to combat what he's called, "the nexus of bad ideas—" a, "mind virus," plaguing the West. These administrators will be shuffled around (as Scott Bok has, tellingly, already hinted at in the case of Magill in his chairman resignation) and/or replaced by people no better (and likely worse, because the more recent the appointee, the more recent the anti-meritocratic criteria). Strangely, Christakis would soon write as though Yale is just now eschewing free speech. Niall Ferguson provides a prosaic model of the congressional testimony in terms of three administrators repeating what university lawyers trained them to say. But while there may be some mounting fear surrounding the first amendment and college's public funding, administrators (to say nothing of Democrat politicians) have not been shy about taking the exact opposite stance on speech during the course of the past decade.

        The day after the Congressional testimony, U Penn President Liz Magill posted to the university's official X account a most-puzzling video in which she "reifies" the lie once more that she and U Penn are merely old-school liberal Constitutionalists. Her gleeful smirk had been replaced by her best attempt at remorse, and in this video, she is apologizing that she and U Penn are behind on the times by protecting the first amendment on their campuses (which, as I will continually repeat in this piece, these institutions do not protect unless you call for the genocide of the straight/white/male/Jew). In response, The Foundation For Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) put out a statement which straddled between pretending U Penn was just now threatening to remove protection for free expression from campus, and admitting that they have been doing so for years. Indeed, in FIRE's own “2024 Free Speech Rankings”, U Penn placed second to last (Harvard placed dead last, Yale in the bottom 10%, and MIT middling). FIRE's Zachary Greenberg then sent a letter to Magill offering FIRE's assistance in her institution holding to the first amendment (this time entirely playing into the narrative that U Penn is only now flirting with removing free speech from campus). This was followed swiftly by Magill's resignation (and ostensibly, her eschewal of FIRE's offer of counsel). She is still a tenured legal professor at U Penn and her fellow resignee, Scott Bok, made a point of predicting that some other university will take the "newly" anti-first-amendment Magill on as their president for a, "second chance," (presumably, at censoring as many students and faculty as possible). What's strange is that FIRE's letter plays into Magill and her colleagues' lies that their institutions have been bastions of free speech until the question of anti-semitism in 2023 has caused them to change course! Perhaps there is a difference between a university's written policy and that policy's enforcement (though I doubt U Penn's written policy is particularly good when it places so low on FIRE's rankings). This leaves a strategic explanation, something that can perhaps be ethically forgiven because FIRE deals with the law where the rubber meets the road. A lawyer, after all, has a responsibility to do whatever is within the confines of the law to defend their potential clients. Yet, especially given Magill didn't (and was never going to) accept FIRE's help, it left FIRE looking dishonest and inconsistent on what it thinks of the state of speech codes at U Penn. This is not good for the cause of free speech.

        The entire ordeal is so surreal in its dishonesty that it appears like deliberate revisionist history. U Penn and other universities across the U.S. have been facing criticism for their destruction of free speech (in scholarship as well as in policy) from the "IDW" for many years. They must have noticed that the members of the "IDW" have largely taken Israel's side in the ongoing conflict, and that they have tended to be rightfully concerned about the anti-semitism apparently rampant on their campuses. Perhaps they cynically chose this issue because so many in the "IDW" are Jewish and have either themselves, or their family, been in serious danger of Muslim terror: Gad Saad, Sam Harris, the Weinstein brothers, Ben Shapiro, Steven Pinker, and Dave Rubin being among their most prominent. Does this situation look any different than if U Penn's administration decided that Magill would pretend to "die on the hill of free speech" in "principled" defense of anti-semitism; come to woke-Jesus in realizing the "old fashioned" error of her ways; and resign in “disgrace” so that U Penn can "do the right thing" in disallowing anti-semitic rhetoric on campus, thereby recruiting "IDW" holdouts into supporting woke speech codes? Give their lockstep answer to the Jewish-genocide question, one wonders if the administrators weren't in cahoots ahead of time, particularly given that the perfectly shared-answer opposes the last decade of their campus culture. This diabolical plot is made more dastardly when you realize that it is not simply that these schools tolerate anti-straight/white/male/semitic speech, they positively indoctrinate it into their students through the earlier-mentioned neo-Marxist world-view which increasingly pervades every major. On the whole, I do not believe this scheme will work particularly well on those “IDW” members named above, but these administrators (and their allies in the Democratic party and media) hold a special power over the ability to, “write [and re-write] the first draft of history,” to which the public tends to uncritically subscribe. If nothing else, I am most bullish on this revisionist-history hypothesis. It appears that the story will be re-written such that universities like Harvard, U Penn, and MIT were free-speech bastions right up until 2023, when conservative Jews transformed them into institutions of safetyism. Those of us in the know will not forgot that in reality, radical leftists working on a '90s transformation of '60s political philosophy removed free speech from the universities in the 2010s, even as they encouraged the popular culture to engage in non-stop anti-straight/white/male/semitic rhetoric.

        I do not think that this fiasco is actually about having or not having speech restrictions on campus (which we have long had, and which have long been trending worse, regardless of this instance), but about the institutions seizing an opportunity to re-frame that history. In an astonishing abdication of duty (or even self-preservation), small-l liberal donors have evidently not appreciably restricted their support for institutions which increasingly oppose their values (even as public support for these institutions reflect a general awareness of the problem), perhaps until this issue. This is likely in part due to a large representation of Jews among such donors, and because the recent history of Israel (to say nothing of the Holocaust) quickly sets off strong alarm bells. The fact is that straight/white/males, and wider society, just cannot fathom something like the Holocaust or the Soviet gulags happening to them in the West, even as they tacitly allow or even support the exact rhetoric thought to precede such atrocities. During the campus response to the present Middle Eastern conflict, some might have hoped that the Jews' superior abilities of preventative defense would protect us (the rest of the woke's enemies) by proxy. Clearly, our cynical enemies have had the opposite idea in mind, to use the Jews' understanding of their own history against them to aid these institutions' continuing designs on destroying the first amendment.

        One of many conspicuous aspects of what I have been calling, The Sophistructure, is that while its premises build an inconsistent house of cards, the structure is unimaginably anti-fragile. It is as if a full-deck of Jokers would be perfectly impervious to a hydrogen bomb, let alone an incisive critique. And so it is that the sophists survived Plato's critiques in antiquity; the lowering standards of academia survived Allen Bloom in the '80s; the social pseudo-sciences survived Paul R. Gross, Norman Levitt, and Pinker in the "science wars" of the 1990s; underlying postmodern philosophy survived Stephen Hicks in the aughts; and, The Great Awokening survived a barrage of attacks from the mid-2010s to the present from Greg Lukianoff, Haidt, Pinker, Harris, Saad,the Weinstein brothers, Heying, Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro, and many more. The Sophistructure takes whatever you throw at it, and comes out stronger. This, along with basic institutional observations, has led Bret Weinstein to propose that, "zero is a special number;" hypothesizing that this isn't sophisticated anti-fragility, but merely the excision of any liberal, scientific competition which really would promptly beat it. While this is clearly part of the strategy, I do not think it is the sole explanation. What I will say is that the power of the cynical, "whatever works," paradigm is that it's an evolutionary selection pressure: it can't as well control what the thing being created turns out to be, but it can make it very fit (in this case, anti-fragile), whatever it turns into. Perhaps a defining feature of this cacophony of nonsense is that it be impervious to critique. This is one reason people sometimes feel they've, “lost control of the monsters they've created,” (one rarely hears this of a well-defined policy subject to checks and balances).

        While the three Presidents answered in lock-step at the hearing, only one, Magill, has gone on to “apologize” for her belief in the first amendment, and resign so that someone new can make sure to get rid of it; if all three had followed similar paths, it would constitute stronger evidence in favor of a plan laid out ahead of time. And given this ideology's plain hegemony, it is difficult to see why they should have to play such games. But perhaps as with a hedge fund manager chasing his next billion, winning just never gets old. The culture war has heated up, and we're losing, badly.