Glenn Greenwald, Co-Founder of The Intercept, Resigns To Maintain Journalistic Integrity

I have been in the process of writing an article that I will title, "Everything Is Becoming Religion." This morning, while writing, I noticed that Glenn Greenwald has resigned from The Intercept, a news organization he co-founded. Here is an except from Greenwald's announcement:

The pathologies, illiberalism, and repressive mentality that led to the bizarre spectacle of my being censored by my own media outlet are ones that are by no means unique to The Intercept. These are the viruses that have contaminated virtually every mainstream center-left political organization, academic institution, and newsroom. I began writing about politics fifteen years ago with the goal of combatting media propaganda and repression, and — regardless of the risks involved — simply cannot accept any situation, no matter how secure or lucrative, that forces me to submit my journalism and right of free expression to its suffocating constraints and dogmatic dictates.

Greenwald's resignation comes on the heels of his riveting three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan earlier this week. During that discussion, Greenwald (and Rogan) aimed Greenwald's criticisms at our most prominent legacy media outlets across the entire political spectrum. And now our social media overlords are actively getting into the game. Three hours is a lot of time, but I would urge you to watch every minute of this. It would be a small investment, given that this discussion offers an accurate diagnosis of America's Dys-information Pandemic and some moral clarity about what needs to happen going forward.

Our prominent legacy news outlets have become sad jokes with regard to many critical national issues. Our "news" is now pre-filtered to protect us from basic facts and it treats thinking as though it is a team sport, much like the dogma people are offered in churches. It treats us like we are babies, as though we aren't able to think for ourselves. Our prominent legacy media outlets have so thoroughly choked off meaningful non-partisan information and discussion that this has ripped open up a dangerous information chasm---many of us now inhabit only one of two mostly non-overlapping factual worlds. This has, in turn, led to two exceedingly disappointing choices for President of this Duopoly. If I needed to hire an employee for any type of job in any business, I would never hire either of these candidates and neither would you. But this is where we are, unable to talk with one another about this sad situation with nuance. In fact, too many of us have been convinced that we should hate each other for having differing opinions, even when we are mostly "on the same side of the aisle."

Somehow, there are many Americans who are still convinced that they can uncritically sit back and "turn on the news." What they will actually be exposed to, for the most part, is reporters who are afraid to ask the same basic questions on the job that they actually and instinctively do ask each other in private. Instead of informing us with a wide range of facts and opinions, they are driven to please their bosses and audience. This is not news. This is Not-News. This parallels the deep dysfunction driven by social media, an issue address in the excellent new documentary, "The Social Dilemma."

We now have a News-Industrial Complex that is driven by money and ideology instead of integrity and courage to engage with inconvenient facts. This system is designed to please you, to give you more of what your intuitive side, your System 1, craves. Once you have this epiphany about what is really going on, you will no longer be able to stop seeing it. If you continue watching the "news," you will increasingly think, "Garbage in, Garbage out." It will increasingly realize that prominent legacy news outlets are fucking with our brains to make money and steer elections. Once you have this epiphany, you will experience a greatly heightened annoyance at what passes for "news" Once a critical mass of people have this epiphany, this will be our first step in a long slow recovery.

Continue ReadingGlenn Greenwald, Co-Founder of The Intercept, Resigns To Maintain Journalistic Integrity

Pew Graphs Illustrate Our Growing Partisan Divide

I found this graph posted by "Number 6" on Twitter today. I haven't been able to track it down independently. If it is accurate, it painfully illustrates our growing cultural/political/partisan divide. In three colors, this is why we can't talk with each other across the aisle any longer.

I think this illustration is worth considering even though it is generally counter-productive to discuss political attitudes on a one-dimensional scale of left-to-right. It is useful in this context because there are only two options for voting for president this year if you want to be able to cast your vote for a person who will actually become president.

Brett Weinstein comments how dangerous this is that our political orientations are increasingly distant from each other.  I agree with him:

Continue ReadingPew Graphs Illustrate Our Growing Partisan Divide

Head Start for Rich Kids

In episode 205 of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris spoke with Daniel Markovits about problems with meritocracy. Markovits is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School. It was an especially engaging and challenging episode that provided many statistics that I hadn't before heard or appreciated. Here's an excerpt I transcribed:

Daniel Markovits: A poor district in America spends maybe eight to $10,000 per pupil per year. Middle Class public schools spends maybe 12,000 to $15,000 per pupil per year, a really rich public school in a town like Scarsdale, New York, where the median household income is over $200,000 a year, spends about $30,000 per pupil per year. And the richest and fanciest private schools in America 80%, of whose kids come from households that make over $200,000 a year, spend maybe $75,000 per pupil per year. So that there's massive inequality in educational investment. This means that if you look at a place like Yale, where I teach, or Harvard or Princeton, or Stanford, there are more kids in those universities whose parents are in the top 1% of the income distribution than in the entire bottom half.

And if you took the difference between what's invested in a typical middle-class kids' education, and what's invested in a typical one-percenter kids’ education, and took that difference every year and put it into the S&P 500, to give it to the rich kid as an inheritance when her parents died--because that's the way aristocrats used to transmit privilege down through the generations--that sum would exceed $10 million per child. So why am I saying this? I'm saying this, because it gives you a sense for the enormity of the educational inequality that exists in our society, between not just or even primarily the middle class and the poor, but between the rich and the middle class. And then if you look at the jobs that pay the most money, at elite law firms, at elite investment banks, elite management jobs, to graduates of elite business schools, all these jobs, specialists, medical doctors, all these jobs, almost require people who do them to have gone through some version of this fancy education.

Sam Harris: So what we have is a system of stratification and exclusion that runs through the central elite institutions of school and work in our society, in which those institutions exclude middle and working class families and children, not excluding them by any intent, but by surely the contingent fact of what it takes to jump through all the hoops you need to jump through to land in Yale or Princeton, or Stanford or Harvard.

Daniel Markovits: Exactly. Stanford admits fewer than 5% of its applicants. That means that if you're applying to college and anything serious ever went wrong in your childhood, you know, parents lost jobs, you had to move all of a sudden, somebody died, and you had to pick up some burden to earn some income for the family, you're not going to have a record that puts you in the top 5% of the already elite pool that tries to apply. . . . There are exceptional people, there are exceptional people always. But unless you're incredibly exceptional, you won't be able to get ahead if you don't have a lot of privilege behind you. And then this privileged class . . . asserts that they've earned their advantage and that they have got there on the merits and that those who are disadvantaged deserve to be disadvantaged because they're not as hard working. They're not as skilled. They're not as virtuous and now those who are excluded get appropriately angry and resentful and turn against the institutions, the schools, the professional companies, the forms of expertise, that people on the outside correctly think are underwriting their disadvantage and exclusion.

And a populist like Trump exploits that resentment. And a lot of people on the left think, "How can class resentment go with Trump rather than against him, given that he was born to a massive inheritance?" And the answer is, yeah, he inherited a lot of money. But he is not part of this system of training, education and professional certification that people correctly see as the principal source of their exclusion. It's not his inheritance that's maybe unjust, maybe not unjust--we can disagree about it--but it's on the margins of our society. Whereas all the doctors and lawyers and bankers and CEOs and elite managers who are training their kids like nobody else can and getting them into the best schools and buying houses in the best neighborhoods and getting them into the best colleges. That's the system that is keeping most Americans down. And so the populist resentment turns against it, in some sense accurately.

Sam Harris: So what is the alternative to meritocracy?

Daniel Markovits: Well, it can't be aristocracy or a caste system based on breeding or on race or on gender. That's, I think, important to say out up front, this you know, if this is a going concern as a social and political project, it can't be backward looking. It has to be forward looking.

Continue ReadingHead Start for Rich Kids

Back to Separate But Equal, and Other Recent Manifestations of Woke Culture

I hate to keep writing about Woke issues, but this ideology increasingly concerns me as the 2020 election approaches.  It is  an issue that mainstream Democrats ignore or downplay, yet the Republicans have recognized it for the cultural cancer that it is.  Woke ideology has successfully entrenched itself deeply into many of our meaning-making institutions and this has positioned it well to spread far, which is unfortunate. Here's a recent example:

Making things worse, far too many Woke advocates are willing to tap into authoritarian tactics.

Andy Ngo's "crime" is that he is reporting on what he is seeing on the streets in Portland, including ongoing attempts to damage or destroy federal property.  The NYT thought this sort of thing was a worthy topic, even when it occurred in a much milder form, when right wing zealots merely occupied federal property for a month in 2016 (see here, for example), but "America's newspaper of record" has barely any interest in Portland or Seattle.  Because of this vacuum, these stories and concerns critical of Woke culture are being covered mostly by conservative media and without sufficient discussion or nuance. As I noted above, it is my concern that these issues are keeping the upcoming election close. This unwillingness by people on the political left to criticize "their own" is unfortunate.  Those relatively few socially brave traditional liberals who are willing to speak out, many of whom consider themselves well-entrenched on the political left, are often being accused of being conservatives/Republicans by others on the political left, merely because they are willing to speak out. This has left many traditional liberals (like me) feeling like we no longer have a political home.

One must usually seek out alternative news sources to find thoughtful discussion about the Woke movement. For those who are trying to get up to speed, consider visiting New Discourses (founded by James Lindsay) and Quillette.

Woke ideology is disproportionately affecting younger adults, people who are increasingly coming into positions of power.  This phenomenon was rather predictable based on The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. For another thoughtful discussion about the correlation of age and receptiveness to Woke ideology, see this Wiki letter exchange between Sarah Haider and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (the following excerpt was written by Sarah Haider):

Wokeism is, perhaps, an anti-ideology—a will to power that can be most concretely identified not by what it values or the future it envisions, but by what it seeks to destroy and the power it demands. This makes it especially disastrous. For, when an existing organizing structure is destroyed with no replacement, a more brutal force can exploit the resulting power vacuum. . . . Once liberal institutions have been delegitimized by the woke, what will replace them?

But while its philosophy is empty, the psychology of wokeism is deeply satisfying to our baser instincts. For the vicious, there is a thrill in playing the righteous inquisitor, in mobbing heretics and demanding deference—brutal tactics that keep the rest of us in line, lest we be targeted next. Meanwhile, the strict social hierarchies of the woke are reassuringly simple to navigate: one always knows one’s place.

By contrast, liberalism flies in the face of human nature. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a phrase so often repeated that we have forgotten how deeply counterintuitive it is. We want to punch the Nazi (or gag him), not defend his right to march. Liberalism might ultimately be good, but it doesn’t feel good. And this is why it may find itself vulnerable to public abandonment, especially in times where it is most necessary. . . .

You rightly point out that liberalism has formidable champions in Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling. Yet Hitchens is gone and all the others are over fifty. Likewise, this summer, when I co-signed an open letter in defense of free debate, I was disconcerted to see how few of the other signatories were even close to my age.

Bari Weiss recently noted that:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.

This has been my experience too. Woke adherence can be predicted by generation - where true liberals exist, they exist primarily among the old guard. If the woke have won over the young, they have captured the future.

This ideology manifests in many other ways too.  For instance, insincere and dishonest debate about the unprecedented surge in (mostly) young girls who are being convinced that they were born in the wrong body, leading to permanent body-altering surgery, hormones and other treatments.  You won't find honest discussion about these issues in mainstream media--certainly not in the NYT. Instead of wide-open discussion based on a foundation of biology and medicine, you will only hear discussions where the "factual" foundation is ideology.  This is insane. There is a war going being waged to protect young girls (progress being made in Great Britain), yet many media outlets are afraid to cover the story. To learn young girls are being physically damaged by this ideology, you'll need to go to places like Joe Rogan's podcast. His recent episode featuring Abigail Shrier and her excellent book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, resulted in an attempt by employees of Spotify to muzzle Rogan on this issue and other Woke issues. Refreshingly, Rogan counter-attacked by posting this video on Twitter, suggesting that he has carefully anchored his right to speak freely in his Spotify contract:

There are some bright spots--some well-placed people calling out Woke ideology for the illiberal, dysfunctional and mostly dishonest cult that it is. For instance, check out this recent discussion between Sam Harris and John McWhorter. That said, for each of these well-placed people willing to speak out, there are many other people who believe in a vigorous and open discussion, a willingness to consider dissenting speech and a dispassionate determination of the facts as the basis for conversation. Unfortunately, most of these people are lesser known than Joe Rogan (and J.K. Rowling) and more vulnerable to cancellation (see the comments here).

I could go on, but I won't do that here.  I'll try to move on to other topics for awhile . . .

Continue ReadingBack to Separate But Equal, and Other Recent Manifestations of Woke Culture

Coleman Hughes Issues an Open Letter and a Stern Challenge to Ibram Kendi

In his analysis of Ibram Kendo's best-selling book, How to be an Anti-Racist, Coleman Hughes points to: 1) unsubstantiated claims, 2) misstated claims and 3) vague terms and 4) absurd claims from Kendi's earlier writings, such as Kendi's earlier belief that "white people are Aliens."

Here is a excerpt from Hughes' discussion:

Kendi says what they probably believe but are too afraid to say namely: "Racial discrimination is not inherently racist." He continues "the defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it's anti-racist. If discrimination is creating inequity then it is racist. The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to pasT discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."

In so far as Kendi's book speaks for modern anti-racism then it should be praised for clarifying what the "anti" really means. Fundamentally, the modern anti-racist movement is not against discrimination. It's against inequity which, in many cases, makes it pro-discrimination. The problem with racial equity defined as numerically equal outcomes between races is that it's unachievable.

Without doubt, we have a long way to go in terms of maximizing opportunity for America's most disadvantaged citizens. Many public schools are subpar and some are atrocious. A sizable minority of black children grow up in neighborhoods replete with crime and abandoned buildings, while the majority grow up in single parent homes. Too many black people are behind bars.

All of this is true, yet none of it implies that equal outcomes are either possible or the proper goal. Kendi discusses inequity between ethnic groups, for example, which he views as identical to inequity between racial groups, as problems created by racist public policy.  This view commits him to some bizarre conclusions. For example, according to the 2017 census bureau data, the average Haitian American earned just 68 cents for every dollar earned by the average Nigerian American.  The average French American earned just 70 cents for every dollar earned by the average Russian American.  Similar examples abound, so ask yourself: "Is it more likely that our society imposes policies that discriminate against American descendants of Haiti and France but not Nigeria or Russia?  Or that disparities between racial and ethnic groups are normal even in the absence of racist policies?

Kendi's view puts him firmly in the first camp.  "To be anti-racist," he writes "is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups," by which he means groups like Haitians and Nigerians, "as problems of policy."  Put bluntly, this assumption is indefensible. What would it take to achieve a world of racial equity top-down enforcement of racial quotas?  A constitutional amendment banning racial disparity? A department of anti-racism to pre-screen every policy for racially disparate impact? These ideas may sound like they were conjured up to caricature anti-racists as Orwellian super villain, but Kendi has actually suggested them as policy recommendations.

As Hughes explains at the end of his video, Kendi has actually proposed a vast bureaucracy, unaccountable to voters, charged with making sure that no national, state or local law is "racist."  This bureaucracy would also be empowered to investigate private businesses and to monitor the speech of public officials to make sure that "racism" (broadly defined by Kendi, to include a complete lack of numerical disparities in hiring) exist.

Hughes ends his video with the following:

How to be an anti-racist is the clearest and most jargon free articulation of modern anti-racism I've read and for that reason alone it's a useful contribution.  But the book is poorly argued, sloppily researched insufficiently fact-checked, and occasionally self-contradictory.  As a result, it fails to live up to its titular promise, ultimately teaching the reader less about how to be anti-racist than about how to be anti-intellectual.

[From Wikipedia]: Coleman Cruz Hughes (born 1996) is an American writer and opinion columnist on issues related to race and racism at the online magazine Quillette, a fellow and contributing editor at City Journal, and host of the podcast Conversations with Coleman. As Coleman Hughes comments: "What could possible go wrong?"

Continue ReadingColeman Hughes Issues an Open Letter and a Stern Challenge to Ibram Kendi