A full 595 former contestants eventually signed on to the final draft of the letter, asking why “Jeopardy!” hadn’t edited out the moment. It went on to proclaim: “We cannot stand up for hate. We cannot stand next to hate. We cannot stand onstage with something that looks like hate.”
. . .
So the element of this story that interests me most is how the beating heart of nerdy, liberal fact-mastery can pump blood into wild social media conspiracy, and send all these smart people down the sort of rabbit hole that leads other groups of Americans to believe that children are being transported inside refrigerators. And, I wanted to know, how they could remain committed to that point of view in the absence of any solid evidence.
What caused this insanity? It's a well-written article by Ben Smith, with applications far beyond Jeopardy. One of the reasons: "Social media turns just about everything into a kind of team sport, including analyzing the ills of social media."
This is a clear example of liberal contagion, in a world filled with both liberal and conservative contagion.
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."
Yeah, I’m picky. I'd like to see modern news outlets carefully determine that they have evidence upon which to base their splashy headlines. I also expect that when they get the facts wrong on an important national issue, that they will clearly and loudly apologize. That's what I want, but that's not what we are getting.
Remember how Officer Brian Sicknick died during the Capitol riot after someone savagely bashed his skull with a fire hydrant? See the video. The problem is that there was never any evidence for this claim. Further, it has now been proven completely untrue based on a recently released autopsy report. Why does this matter that there was never any evidence to support this widely promulgated claim? Glenn Greenwald points out that without an intentional bludgeoning of Sicknick, the DNC-aligned media (as opposed to FOX, which is the GOP-aligned media) had no claim that the Trump mob killed anyone, which they sorely craved. Take a look at the "news":
[T]he new “norms” in the business have disincentivized traditional outlets to care about accuracy, leading to huge quantities of mistakes. When news agencies see their jobs as being primarily about politics, they become more concerned with being directionally right than technically accurate, knowing among other things that their audiences will forgive them for being wrong, so long as they’re wrong about the “right” targets.
Many of our biggest media outlets have signed up to be cheerleaders for their favorite political team. They have assumed the role of nannies to serve the cravings of their followers. They choose narratives that their respective teams will approve, then they concoct stories based news sources like these: “some believe,” or “sources say” and other creative dissemblings. By using vapor-sources like these, lies can be quickly converted into "news" stories that will sell ads and make their team's readers happy. Many of our biggest media outlets are co-dependent and co-captured in this way, as repeatedly documented by Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Walter Cronkite must be crying in his grave that our major media outlets are fully invested in what Taibbi terms bombholing:
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.
If you still have a smidgeon of trust in our major media outlets, watch this video by Matt Taibbi to the end, where you will experience more bombholing per second than you ever before thought imaginable:
Where am I going with this post? I'm frustrated, actually disgusted, with what used to be a proud industry, the only industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution: the press. As discussed by Felix Salmon, here's what Americans now think about the traditional news media.
When we catch our big modern monied “news” outlets running such garbage, it impeaches their character. It tells us that that we should not trust them in the future. It should also concern us about what they are suppressing. What they are hiding from us from our own good? What, in addition to the (true) story that the laptop did belong to Hunter Biden (a story that says more about the partisanship of U.S. spy agencies and news media than anything else? What else is being suppressed? How about the nationwide problem that school and university professors are being forced to either proclaim allegiance to neo-racist Woke ideology or to completely shut up at Evergreen College, Smith College, University of Vermont, USC, UCSD and (most recently) Grace Church School in Manhattan. This same Woke ideology also spills into numerous corporations and cultural institutions. There are many other examples. I have spoken to many of these teachers and attorneys who verify these stories, yet these stories are intentionally uncovered by the DNC-aligned media, with the rarest of exceptions.
Second take. What are my expectations regarding the modern media? News outlets should be at least as principled as high school newspapers, given that we rely upon them for information we use to decide who to run the country. I expect that editors will reject stories for which there is no evidence.
I lean strongly to the left on most political issues, but there are a lot of self-proclaimed progressives who despise people like me who question the “progressive” canon. Their solution for people like me: they try to hurt my feelings by calling me a “conservative.” I've seen it over and over. It is laughable. These are the many people for whom thinking has become a team sport, who are afraid to allow facts to fall where they will and only THEN concoct opinions. These are the victims we were warned about by the excellent documentary, "The Social Dilemma." They have lost their ability to think critically, both by silo-inducing social media and also by politically corrupted legacy media.
I obtained the factual bits of this story by reading Glenn Greenwald, who self-publishes at Substack in order to escape the reach of editors and co-workers who think their jobs are to swear allegiance to a particular political party. He points out in his piece the hatred toward him by many of those in the legacy media for his crime of pointing out these problems.
Because of its centrality to the media narrative and agenda, anyone who tried to point out the serious factual deficiencies in this story — in other words, people trying to be journalists — were smeared by Democratic Party loyalists who pretend to be journalists as "Sicknick Truthers,” white nationalist sympathizers, and supporters of insurrection.
I need to mention, Greenwald takes massive abuse for reporting for the sake of getting the facts right, and the social venom to which he is subjected seems to make dig in even harder to set the record straight.
I will end with one more excerpt from Greenwald's article to demonstrate the extreme levels of hypocrisy the Sicknick story illustrates. The title of Greenwald’s article: “The Media Lied Repeatedly About Officer Brian Sicknick's Death. And They Just Got Caught. Just as with the Russia Bounty debacle, they will never acknowledge what they did. Their audience wants to be lied to for partisan gain and emotional pleasure.”
Truth matters. Noble lies are never justified no matter the cause, especially in journalism. But these employees of corporate media outlets have been taught the exact opposite model: that their primary obligation is to please and flatter the partisan agenda and political sensibilities of their audience even if it means lying or recklessly spreading unproven theories to do it. That is their profit model. And they have trained their audiences to want and expect this and that is why they never feel compelled to engage in any self-critique or accountability when they get caught doing this: their audiences want to be lied to — they are grateful for it — and would prefer that they not admit they did it so that their partisan interests will not be undermined.
What is most depressing about this entire spectacle is that, this time, they exploited the tragic death of a young man to achieve their tawdry goals. They never cared in the slightest about Officer Brian Sicknick. They had just spent months glorifying a protest movement whose core view is that police officers are inherently racist and abusive. He had just become their toy, to be played with and exploited in order to depict the January 6 protest as a murderous orgy carried out by savages so primitive and inhuman that they were willing to fatally bash in the skull of a helpless person or spray them with deadly gases until they choked to death on their own lung fluids. None of it was true, but that did not matter — and it still does not to them — because truth, as always, has nothing to do with their actual function. If anything, truth is an impediment to it.
Exploding numbers of people are falling prey to Woke ideology. Those steeped in Wokeness claim that they cannot cope with people who challenge their own world view, even slightly. They see offensive ideas (even barely offensive ideas) as a form of “violence.” This is in contrast to the approach used by classical liberals (and many conservatives), who want their ideas to be challenged. Subjecting one’s ideas to the marketplace of ideas is for the betterment of society in the spirit of John Stuart Mill’s book, On Liberty (Free download of an abridged version from Heterodox Academy here). Ideas invite opposing ideas, because they are opportunities to explore, extend and deepen the truth.
Feelings, on the other hand, seek only validation. Feelings clash with opposing feelings and ideas. Wokeness is an ideology that heavily relies on feelings, often seeking to disparage and ridicule the use of Enlightenment approach to learning by the sorts of tactics used by authoritarian dictators, including cancel culture, compelled speech, struggle sessions and censorship. Wokeness has many of the hallmarks of a fundamentalist religion whose main tactic is attempting to silence any person who refuses to bow and give total homage to the ideology.
InThe Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (2019), Attorney Greg Lukianoff (President of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt have diagnosed America’s mushrooming inability to engage in productive civil discourse (see here for the Atlantic article that was the basis for the book). One of my biggest take-homes from Coddling of the American Mindis that our most visible and powerful sense-making institutions (many universities and media outlets) have allowed the proven healing therapy of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to be turned upside down and used as a weapon for indoctrinating our children and young adults to ever-higher levels of cognitive dysfunction. Although we should sometimes trust our feelings, that is often not a good idea. Our feelings often mislead us into a convoluted moral landscape that destroys human flourishing (the focus of Paul Bloom's book, Against Empathy). When our feelings are substantially misleading us, we might need psychotherapy, such as CBT, which has been repeatedly proven to help people who have the following cognitive distortions:
EMOTIONAL REASONING: Letting your feelings guide your interpretation of reality. “I feel depressed; therefore, my marriage is not working out.”
CATASTROPHIZING: Focusing on the worst possible outcome and seeing it as most likely. “It would be terrible if I failed.”
OVERGENERALIZING: Perceiving a global pattern of negatives on the basis of a single incident. “This generally happens to me. I seem to fail at a lot of things.”
DICHOTOMOUS THINKING (also known variously as “black-and-white thinking,” “all-or-nothing thinking,” and “binary thinking”): Viewing events or people in all-or-nothing terms. “I get rejected by everyone,” or “It was a complete waste of time.”
MIND READING: Assuming that you know what people think without having sufficient evidence of their thoughts. “He thinks I’m a loser.”
LABELING: Assigning global negative traits to yourself or others (often in the service of dichotomous thinking). “I’m undesirable,” or “He’s a rotten person.” NEGATIVE
FILTERING: You focus almost exclusively on the negatives and seldom notice the positives. “Look at all of the people who don’t like me.”
DISCOUNTING POSITIVES: Claiming that the positive things you or others do are trivial, so that you can maintain a negative judgment. “That’s what wives are supposed to do—so it doesn’t count when she’s nice to me,” or “Those successes were easy, so they don’t matter.”
BLAMING: Focusing on the other person as the source of your negative feelings; you refuse to take responsibility for changing yourself. “She’s to blame for the way I feel now,” or “My parents caused all my problems.”
Lukianoff and Haidt point out that the dysfunctions listed above are the symptoms of the current Woke dysfunction on some campuses. We are encouraging this dysfunction whenever we shut down meaningful conversation regarding controversial claims, e.g., that biology makes clear evidence-based distinctions between males and females and that this can be done with a high degree of accuracy at birth. Somehow, in the year 2021, this exact fact-based claim has become, for many, a mark of "bigotry" and “violence.”
Those who have been thoroughly indoctrinated with the opposite of CBT willingly embrace massive disfunction, refusing to give alternate viewpoints charitable readings, focusing on negative possibilities, assuming that other people are threats, shoving people into silos of “good” and “bad” and casting blame for all of one’s frustrations on others, refusing to accept responsibility for changing themselves. Woke ideology has turned numerous people into adult-sized toddlers. And throughout this turmoil, many of the adults running our institutions sit there, “peeing in their pants” (as John McWhorter explains), refusing to say the obvious because they can’t bear to be called names like “racist” by Woke mobs, even when there is no basis for such name-calling. Here is the relevant video (Min 29), where John McWhorter is discussing the problem with many school administrators with Glenn Loury:
Apparently, the entire curriculum has been turned upside down into these endless indoctrination sessions about the nature of racial oppression in the United States, including role playing games and separation of people by race. And all of this being done by people who think of themselves on the side of the angels. This is a school that's been running for 100 years as one of the most innovative and effective educational institutions on earth. And because of the fear that these CRT types inspire in other people--the idea that if you don't agree with them, you're going to be called a racist in public--goodness gracious, that scares people. The whole school has possibly been ruined. Bryn Mawr was essentially taken over by students demanding that kind of ideology as what was taught in all classrooms for weeks, to the point that some people have withdrawn their students from the school. The President, or whatever the head of Bryn Mawr is called, and she should be called out, Kim Cassidy actually gave in to these students and apologized for initially criticizing them for, for example, making other students--frankly most of the student body--scared to their socks for not agreeing to this idea that the education in the school needed to be completely hijacked. This sort of thing is happening in various places. And in each case, CRT fans could say, well, that's extreme, but. But the problem is, this has become a meme nationwide and we only need think about the Princeton letter that we've talked about, which basically implies that Princeton ought to be run by a star Chamber of people deciding what's racist and what isn't.
This whole dialogue is getting a little frightening, I write about it actually, in my latest Atlantic piece, and I have to say, my latest Substack piece. This stuff is scary, and I would bring it up, even if there wasn't my new substack account. This way of looking at things really is becoming overly influential. The reason I'm saying it is overly influential is because it doesn't teach people how to think constructively except about one very narrow thing. And it's not based on any coherent philosophy of education.
It's a religion. This is religion being preached as some sort of higher truth by people, most of whom I doubt consider themselves very religious. So okay, we're not going to have the White House prescribing against critical race theory in education. But on the other hand, we do need to have a conversation if there's going to be a racial reckoning under the Biden administration, as to what that reckoning is going to be. And if the reckoning is going to be that any Black person who decides to exert the performance art of saying that their institution is racist, [they] will have 90% of what they demand given to them, because everybody is peeing their pants, being afraid that somebody is going to call them a bigot on Twitter. This country is in serious trouble. And anybody who wants to tell me that I shouldn't say that until there's no such thing as a right wing militia zealot who might overtake the Capitol? Anybody who says that we can't talk about that until we do something about the idiots on the right?
Well, you know what? Frankly, I don't believe you. I think that really the people who say that just don't want to hear what they know is a truth because they're afraid that somebody is going to call them racist on Twitter if they don't bow down. We've got to sit these people back down--and notice I'm not saying chase them out of the room. But the hyper wokesters need to go back to the way it was 20 years ago when they were one voice at the table. And it does not make anybody a right-wing zealot to feel that what's happening at places like Dalton is deeply, deeply wrong. You can be somebody who's just a good old fashioned liberal.
These cowards, our university administrators and editors at major sense-making institutions, are enabling psychotherapeutic dysfunction on a nationwide scale. They need to stiffen their spines and start speaking up as a group. The Woke activists are a loud shrill minority, even though it doesn't look that way when you read the woke-infested legacy media these days.
As far as a cure, is there, anywhere in the U.S., a clinical psychologist’s office big enough for CBT sessions for tens of millions of people?
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