Professor Aaron Kindsvatter created this YouTube video to share his concerns about Woke ideology spreading across campus at the University of Vermont, where he works. He is not convinced that the way to fight racism is with more racism. Making this video was outside of Kindsvatter's comfort zone, as you can see when you watch the video. The points he is raising are common sense, however, which is why critical race advocates refuse to expose their ideology to public debate.
Have you had enough of this Woke bullshit yet? Where are you going to draw your line? When will you stop giving ground and announce "Enough"? We're starting to turn this ship around. It's time for all kind-hearted thoughtful people to stand up and be counted.
These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year — a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board — is teaching students that capitalism is evil.
For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution” — unveiled this July, in a 20-page document — is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.
. . .
But physics looks different these days. “We don’t call them Newton’s laws anymore,” an upperclassman at the school informs me. “We call them the three fundamental laws of physics. They say we need to ‘decenter whiteness,’ and we need to acknowledge that there’s more than just Newton in physics.”
What happens when the Venn diagram of "news" coverage by outlets on the political Left and Right have almost no overlap? What happens when our "news" outlets become singularities, where people on the political Left rarely tune into Right-leaning "news" outlets and vice versa? What happens when consumers of the "news" become too trusting, too obedient, too subservient to the carefully crafted political narratives of their favorite news outlets? It is at that point that news consumers become dupes. Worse, they become agitated dupes who don't want to hear about their blind spots. People on both the political Left and Right insist that they are well informed merely because they get their "news" from the A, B, C outlets. In the meantime, John Stuart Mill is spinning in his grave over our collective self-induced sickness.
This is the current state of news media and its most rapacious consumers. Matt Taibbi explains the main danger: the lack of informational course-correction. It is now common that blatant errors of fact take root and live on indefinitely. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi's latest article atTK, where he offers many examples (you will be pummeled with examples beginning at the 6-minute mark of Taibbi's video, below). You can find this article at Matt's Substack website. The title his article is "The Bombhole Era":
This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.
This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.
A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters.
In the above video, Taibbi explains that the "news" media now operates like a Ponzi scheme, promising yet failing to pay off. Here is a quote from the one-minute mark:
You've heard of a Ponzi scheme? You promise guaranteed returns using money from the new suckers to pay off the old ones and nobody ever finds out you are bankrupt all along. The bombshell era is a journalistic ponzi scheme you sell every scandal as the biggest ever you stoke audience expectations with words like "historic," "unprecedented," "treason," "Watergate," "concentration camp," "reichstag" and BOOM! You dismount into dramatic predictions before moving on to the next mania.
Yes, I know. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies and social media are private companies. But consider also that 95% (or something like that) of our communications to each other are funneled through social media. When Youtube shuts down a journalist's coverage of a news-worthy event based on an absurd interpretation of its unilaterally imposed guidelines, it's something we should document and fix (I don't pretend to have an easy fix). Matt Taibbi tells the story here. It's part of a growing trend. This issue burst onto the national stage when Twitter shut down the New York Post's account over the Hunter Biden censorship story. Krystal Ball's tweet at The Rising sums up this latest incident:
This is "progress" for San Francisco Board of Education." Per the article, it will cost $10,000 to rename each school. Excerpt from the NYT:
Following the unrest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, which led to the killing of a protester by a white supremacist, the board moved in 2018 to establish a commission to evaluate renaming schools to “condemn any symbols of white supremacy and racism,” said Gabriela López, the board president.
The commission had decided that schools named after figures who fit the following criteria would be renamed: “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
My question: How many of members of the SF BD of Educ thought this was a ridiculous idea, yet sat on their hands in silence, afraid to speak out?
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