John McWhorter Discusses Anti-Racism with Bill Maher

Linguistics Professor John McWhorter sat down with Bill Maher on a recent episode of Real Time to discuss "anti-racism." McWhorter describes himself as someone who is hearing things that don't make sense and his quest is to try to obsessively make sense of things like "anti-racism."  The interview was as intense as it was fast-moving. Several take-aways:

A) "Anti-racism" condescends to people who identify as "black," infantilizing them.

B) There is a great diversity of thought among those who identify as black, almost two-thirds of whom are middle class (or even higher earning), the majority of whom do not live in ongoing fear of being harassed or shot by the police,

C) None of this is to suggest that there isn't still racism, which needs to be addressed.

D) Wokeness is a religion where "whiteness" functions as "original sin" that afflicts even babies, a religion where Robin DiAngelo's misguided book, White Fragility is mistakenly being treated as "research" instead of second-rate literature that advocates for victimization;

E) People pretend to "atone" for "white privilege" by posting on FB that they are "doing the work." This solves nothing.

F) White Fragility is not representative of "the general black view of things."

G) There is no one "black view" of things - Also, "'Yes we can't'" has never been the slogan for black America and it's not now."

H) In the religion of Wokeness, advocates pretend that "racism has never been worse" than today, even in the 1960's and even during the 1850's. These are palpable untruths to any person who knows even a tiny bit of history. "Why is it un-black to address degree?"

I) It is childish for anyone to shut down opposing views to protect themselves from never being told that they are wrong. This "cathartic" approach will never change anything. We need meaningful engagement.

J) Social media has everyone "peeing in their pants," afraid to defer even minimally from Woke orthodoxy, which is making "mendacity" ubiquitous.

K) The fear of being honest and the fear to even tell a joke is "becoming almost everywhere. The only exceptions are people who are "weird like us and you don't mind being hated. But most people are not going to have that disease, and so we are stuck where we are."

If you'd like to follow John McWhorter, you can find him on his own Substack Website, It Bears Mentioning.   Also, McWhorter often joins Glenn Loury for conversation at The Glenn Show on Patreon. 

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George Carlin is Desperately Needed to Poke at the Woke

We need George Carlin like never before, but he is no longer with us.  He was willing to ignore propriety and power centers and to pull the scabs off social absurdities with polished eloquence. He was able to do this because he no longer "had a stake in the outcome" of the "freak show." We need someone like Carlin to expose and ridicule the absurdities of modern wokeness, especially on college campuses. Unfortunately, some prominent comedians, including Chris Rock, have given up on performing for college students because they have become so Woke.  I believe I heard Ricky Gervais express this same reluctance in a discussion with Sam Harris (in these notes, he discusses the minefield encountered by modern comedians). The following short video illustrates what comedians are up against on campus.

Check out 3:40 of this video, the speaker is talking about what "they" want and the interviewer challenged her: "They don't speak with one voice, do they?" She then claims that 18-21 year olds are "diverse." This is a deep issue, perhaps the defining issue of today: For many people today, "diversity" does not include intellectual diversity. Her comment revealed the intense tribal energy in our coddled young people, as well as their desperate felt need to be protected ideas they consider offensive.

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The Continuing Relevance of John Stuart Mill at Schools and Colleges

Last week I attended a seminar sponsored by Heterodox Academy. The title: Does Mill Still Matter? Among those featured at the seminar were Jonathan Haidt, Richard Reeves and Dave Cicirelli, co-creators of "All Minus One," an illustrated version of the second chapter of Mill's On Liberty. This new book can be downloaded for free.

I transcribed the following excerpts of Jonathan Haidt comments. What follows are Haidt's words at the live seminar, minimally edited for print.

What I think is happening on campus is that we've traditionally played a game in which somebody puts forth an argument and then somebody critiques it. And that's what we've done for 1000’s of years, until about 2015. And then, a new game came into town, where people weren't seeing this like tennis, a game we are playing a game together. They saw it more as a battle like boxing or something where it was a struggle for dominance and power. And when you think of it that way, yeah, it's hard work. And it's painful. But if you think about it as like, you know, playing tennis or a game together, you're expending calories. It's not exactly hard work. It's hard play. And that's what I've always loved about being an academy is that it always felt like hard play. Until 2015.

A common phrase that began in 2014-2015, which is, “you are denying my existence” or “If that speaker comes [to campus to talk], then he or she is denying my existence.” And, you know, it's suddenly came out of nowhere. And we're all talking about what do you mean, denying your existence? And it's because this new way of thinking, where it's all a battle for power, and it's all about identity. And so if there's an is there's a speaker who's critical that on transition-- doesn't accept the reigning dogma on the trans issue? Well, that person thinks, or you might think, that they're critiquing an argument about something. But critiquing the argument is critiquing the identity, which means you're denying that I exist. That really helps us understand why there's such incoherence on campus since 2015, because some people are taking any criticism of their ideas as an attack on their person. And therefore you think I don't belong here on campus. And again, you can't have a university like that.

I also just want to add in one of my favorite quotes I've found in the five or six years I've been working on this topic. This is from Van Jones when he spoke at the University of Chicago. He was asked by, David Axelrod, what he thinks about students who are demanding no platforming and safe spaces and things like that. And while this isn't exactly million in that he's not really talking about, like the benefit to truth, but he's talking about the way this actually makes you stronger and smarter. This is just so brilliant. He says, there's a certain kind of safety, that it’s safety from physical attacks. You know, of course, we care about physical safety. But then he says, I don't want you to be safe ideologically. I don't want you to be safe, emotionally, I want you to be strong. And that's different. I'm not going to pave the jungle for you put on some boots and learn how to deal with adversity, I'm not going to take all the weights out of the gym. That's the whole point of the gym. This is the gym. And Richard and his friends protested outside as a political act. And then they went in because it was the gym, and they actually wanted to hear what he had to say. And that, I think, is the model of a politically engaged college student, or what it should do.

I was asked, What do you think is most fundamental question? And they say, Oh, you know, is there a god? Or what's the meaning of life? No, that's like, a big question. Fundamental means, basic, like the thing that everything else is built on. The fundamental question of life, is approach or avoid. That's it. As soon as life began moving, as soon as you get little tails on bacteria, you have to have some mechanism for deciding this way or that? Approach or avoid? And all of the rest of the billion years of brain evolution is just commentary on that question.

And so the human brain has these gigantic tracts of neurons on the front left cortex, specialized for approach. And then a frontal cortex specialized for avoid. And so all sorts of things go with this. So when we're in explorer mode, some features of it are, we're more, we're curious. We take risks. You might feel like a kid in a candy shop with all these different things to explore. You think for yourself. And the model of a student in this mindset would be whoever grows the most by graduation, or whoever learns the most by graduation wins. If that's your attitude, boy, are you going to profit from being in college for four years. [More . . . ]

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Facebook Again Censors Accurate Information – This Time on Deficiencies of Renewable Energy

Michael Shellenberger has made a serious claim that renewables cannot get us where we need to go. For that, he argues, we need to invest in nuclear power. Facebook censored Shellenberger even though he was deemed correct by researchers at Princeton and Bloomberg news. FB shut down the conversation on yet another critically important national issue. Shellenberger's article is titled "Finally They Admit Renewables Are Terrible For The Environment: New research from Princeton University and Bloomberg confirms that renewables require 300 - 400 times more land than natural gas and nuclear plants."

Over the last few years, I have been pushing back against the idea that renewables are good for the environment. In 2019 I published, “Why Renewables Can’t Save the Planet,” which was the most-read article of the year at Quillette, and gave a TEDx talk by the same name, which today has 2.5 million views. And last year, in Apocalypse Never, I pointed out that wind and solar projects require 300 to 400 times more land than nuclear or natural gas plants, and that 100% renewables would require increasing land used for energy from 0.5% today to 25% to 50%.

Needless to say, the renewable energy industry and its boosters haven’t liked what I’ve written, and have sought to cancel me. Last year, a group of activist scientists denounced me as factually wrong, and demanded that I be censored by Facebook. They drew on junk science to claim that solar required just 3.6 times more land and wind just 5.8 times more than nuclear and natural gas plants. In response, Facebook censored me and denied me the right to appeal their verdict.

But now researchers at Princeton University and Bloomberg News have admitted that I was right and my critics were wrong.

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