DEI as the Antithesis of Free Speech

Randy Wayne, a biology professor at Cornell University has written an op-ed at the New York Post: "Cornell wants to ‘express itself’ but ‘diversity, equity, inclusion’ are in the way."

The goal of DEI activism, however, is the antithesis of free expression. Activists tend to believe they already know what is true and demonstrate little need for discussions that can change hearts and minds. They readily say so themselves.

Ibram X. Kendi, the most prominent leader in the DEI movement, for instance, concedes in his seminal book “How to be an Antiracist” — “An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change . . . [and the] Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. It is a suicidal strategy.”

Unlike the civil- and gay-rights movements, which required free speech to change legislation, the DEI movement requires the cancellation of free speech to influence power and policy. This is because the DEI bureaucrats are activists-in-disguise, at once unable and unwilling to defend their ideology with reasoned arguments based on truth.

This was demonstrated last month in a debate at MIT on a resolution that academic DEI programs should be abolished. None of the approximately 90 people in DEI positions at MIT chose to defend their ideology by participating in the debate.

Wayne's concerns remind me that the gurus of antiracism (Robin DiAngelo, Ibram Kendi) refuse to debate their ideas in public. You won't find them fielding questions and objections to their ideas on the Internet. They are preachers, not teachers. For years, I have used this as my rule of thumb: If someone refuses to debate their ideas, it is because they are afraid of scrutiny because they know don't have good ideas. Apparently, this is also the case at Cornell, where none of the 90 DEI administrators was willing to show up to discuss the merits of DEI.

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“No One is Safe”: The Many Stages of the COVID Messaging Campaign.

Matt Orfalea offers a new collection of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, including a collective roar against “asking questions” or “doing your own research.”

Matt Taibbi follows up with this article: "Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign: As Matt Orfalea's new video shows, Apologies are due for the media campaign against "the unvaccinated," which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy." An excerpt:

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn’t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against “the unvaccinated” are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.

You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.

In this case one didn’t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an “evolving situation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions — first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission — left even people who wanted to follow official advice unsure of what to do.

I hope Matt’s video survives as a warning. There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic — certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there — but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.

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About “Book Banning” and Young Children.

Deciding what is age-appropriate is not "book banning." This is not a difficult distinction except for those who seek headlines based on half-truths.

I've seen images of many of the pages of many of the books that have purportedly been "banned" from grade school students. As a parent, I would have been aghast had my young children had access to most of these books without my specific knowledge or consent. BTW, I know "Elizabeth Bennett" personally and I have no doubt that what she has written is true.

The following is an excerpt from the Court's Aug 5, 2022 Order in the case of C.K.-W v Wentzville R-IV School District Order Denying Preliminary Injunction, US District Court, Eastern District of Missouri Case No. 4:22-cv-00191. We are facing some real problems with conservatives going crazy banning valuable and age-appropriate books in school libraries. Before you fall prey to the claim that ALL of "book banning" cases are the same, however, consider the court's description of the books being "banned" in this case:

'Fun Home,' for example, has entire illustrated pages showing characters engaging in oral sex along with accompanying ribald language. Doc. [2] at 214; see also id. at 80–81 (showing various detailed illustrations of two undressed individuals in bed together with the narrator explaining that she “spent very little of the remaining semester outside her bed”). 'All Boys Aren’t Blue' vividly describes multiple sexual encounters of the author. See Doc. [3]. “He reached his hand down and pulled out my dick. He quickly went to giving me head. . . . [W]e dry humped and grinded. . . . I put some lube on and got him up on his knees, and I began to slide into him from behind. . . . I eased in, slowly, until I heard him moan. . . . I finally came and let out a loud moan—to the point where he asked me to quiet down for the neighbors. I pulled out of him and kissed him while he masturbated. Then, he also came.” Id. at 266–268. All Boys Aren’t Blue details another encounter. “[H]e told me to lie down on the bed. He asked me to ‘turn over’ while he slipped a condom on himself. . . . [T]his was my ass, and I was struggling to imagine someone inside me. And he was . . . large. But I was gonna try.” Id. at 270–71 (second ellipsis in original).

In keeping with the pattern, 'Heavy: An American Memoir' likewise has detailed accounts of sexual encounters. The book does not attempt to hide its contents. As the back cover explains, the book discusses the author’s “complex relationship with his family, weight, sex, gambling and writing.” Doc. [4]. The author writes that “Renata pulled up her shirt, unhooked her bra, and filled my mouth with her left breast. . . . Choking on Renata’s breasts made me feel lighter than I’d ever felt. After a few minutes, Renata grabbed my penis and kept saying, ‘Keep it straight, Kie. Can you keep it straight?’” Id. at 22–23. And elsewhere, “I got close enough to the door to see Delaney was standing in the middle of the room with his soggy maroon swim trunks around his calves. Dougie was on his knees in front of Delaney with his hands behind his back. His tongue was out, licking the tip of Delaney’s penis.” Id. at 40.

Could a librarian or, ultimately, a school board official conclude that these books were age suitable for some older students and that the books merited inclusion based on their content overall? Sure. But can this Court conclude that the librarian’s determination that these books were not age appropriate was a pretense, absent some actual evidence, and that the real decisive reason for the removal was to deny access to students of certain ideas? Not at all. But Plaintiffs make the sweeping and, frankly, disconcerting request to have this Court require that the District “restore access” to these three books and “any books that were removed from school libraries during this school year and for which access has not been restored.” Doc. [19] at 17 (emphasis added). Meaning Plaintiffs would have this Court force the District to provide access to these, or any other books, that the District’s librarians concluded were appropriate for removal no matter the reason. Even if one of these books, or another that was even more sexually explicit, had been available to a library that served third graders, either inadvertently or because the librarian was unaware of the content, Plaintiffs would have this Court order the District to return the book for the third graders to read.

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Meaningful Discussions of Contentious Topics

The first question we must ask regarding EVERY controversy is whether one side is disproportionately well-funded, institutionally-fortified and ill-motivated (by $, power or ideology) and thus able to manufacture a false consensus. If so, meaningful discussion is impossible.

Excellent analysis of the problem with most transgender discussions by Geoffrey Miller here:

Miller Tweets:

Good thread, in principle. But in practice, the woke left has captured most of the biomedical scientific institutions. If we want studies challenging their narrative, who gives the research grants? Which academics would have the guts to run the studies, knowing it would nuke their careers? Who else is willing to collaborate on the studies? Which journals would even consider them? Who would review them objectively? How would journals withstand woke pressure to retract 'transphobic' studies? Which media would cover the results, rather than ignoring them? These problems seem very severe... and probably explain why we haven't already seen countervailing studies.

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FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Importance of Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE, addressing the audience at FIRE's recent gala expanding its free speech mission beyond schools and colleges. I created the following transcript based on this video:

Athens. 375 BCE. The agora. A man goes before the agora, and he talks about a better world in which the smartest of us would would lead us the people who can understand the real and permanent truth that exists beyond our common understanding. It would be a new and better world led by the Guardian class. And a man stands up and says, "Plato, this sounds awful. Like really awful. "By philosopher kings, you mean like you right? And you really think us dummies sit and watched shadows all day?"

Fast forward ahead to the French Revolution. Robespierre is defending the terror by citing the general will. This same figure pops up again, and says, by "general will," you mean like yours, right?

Fast forward again, to default to the Bolshevik revolution. People say to Lenin, "You know, I don't know if you're seeing this. But your system makes good people into suckers and sociopaths and gives them superpowers, right?"

And then fast forward again to the Nazis. And someone stands up and says, "So you guys think you're really into evolution, and you don't understand biodiversity?"

And sometimes these people managed to survive because instead of saying any of this stuff, they stand up and instead say, "I don't want to get guillotine. Anybody else want to move to the United States?"

And a lot of us are descended from these very types of people. I am for one. And why do I bring this weirdo up? Because he is us. He is people like the people in this room. People who do not like the arrogance of power. People who do not like the idea that someone who thinks they're smarter than us is going to tell us what to say or what to think. It's the personality that brings us all together.

So one thing that all the weirdos that I work out at FIRE have in common is we hate bullies. What is our job? Our job is to fight the Guardians, now and forever. And the problem is, of course, that a lot of times, this is a population that self-elects in every generation, the ones who are going to save us from ourselves. Weirdly enough, they oftentimes claim to speak for the people, which doesn't really work. The funny thing is they usually talk about, "Oh, I speak to the people. I mean, maybe there's people over there. They're the real people. You might have false consciousness or something.

And whenever you hear this, and it's very important to say today, when someone says that they claim to speak for the people, you should say to them, "Why don't you let the people speak for themselves?" That is the wisdom of the First Amendment. So what do we get as we celebrate free speech, as we celebrate the First Amendment? We should remember what we fight for, because the fight is getting harder. But we need to remember why we fight for it. So what does free speech give us? Free speech does not give us certainty. And that's a good thing. Certainty is a dangerous illusion. But it does give us richness. It does give us complexity. It does give us nuance. It does give us awe if we're lucky. And it gives us the only chance we'll ever have to know the world as it really is. And what does free speech give us that's better than civility? Candor, and authenticity. Authenticity. You cannot be yourself if you're not allowed to speak. Censorship is a tactic used over and over again that societies use to lie to themselves that they're just fine. And that's why I've joked for years that censorship is like taking Xanax for syphilis. It makes you feel a little better about your horrible disease. But your horrible disease keeps getting worse.

What else can free speech give you that the Guardians can't? Individuality? You can't have individuality without freedom of speech. There's a cynicism that often goes with this. Just remember that when people talk about being unique individuals--and we have all of this kind of putting people in the groups--remember, your individual uniqueness is a scientific and mathematical fact. Not some goofy poetic vision. It's literally true and never let someone take that away from you.

On the Other Side, none of us are all that smart individually, except for maybe Steve Pinker, who's here tonight. But if we stay curious, intellectually humble and keep talking to each other, we can know a billion billion times more than any lone human being. It'll be messy. It'll be strange. It'll sometimes be troubling. But I'd rather live in the real world with the unruly and ever-evolving lot of you than to live in the dreary conformity of any utopia. I want nothing to do with utopia. It's a place where humans can't go and stay fully human. The chaotic paradise, the loud, creative cacophony of a free people, is where I want to be.

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