The “Dangerous” Substack Revolution

Matt Taibbi has noticed considerable criticism about news reporters moving to Substack. The criticism is that they are functionally stealing the cred they earned within news organizations, where there are purportedly "standards" to keep the news proper, but then are jumping onto their own pirate ships where they can capriciously follow their whims. A recent critic is "UCLA professor Sarah Roberts, co-leader of something called the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry — media critics whose stated goal is “strengthening democracy through culture-making." She tweeted that these actions by Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and other prominent reporters who have made this leap are  "dangerous."

Taibbi responded at length from TK News, his Substack account. Here's an excerpt:

[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.

As a result, many reporters by last summer found themselves navigating newsrooms where they were being discouraged, sometimes openly, from pursuing true stories with the “wrong” message — the health impacts of the BLM protests, speech controversies in science and media, follow-up news about once-bombshells like the Cambridge Analytica scandal or “Bountygate.” Many of those people weren’t politically conservative at all (in fact, often quite the opposite). They’d just been trained to do the job in a more dispassionate way, and were being pushed by an increasingly monolithic newsroom culture to run with simplistic, hot-taking versions of the news (as one reporter put it, describing the BLM protests, “I’m sympathetic, but every story had to be Viva la revolución”). The choice for many of these people was to go along, or get out, and where a lot of them got out was to Substack.

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No Thanks, [Formerly Prestigious American University]. I Need to Go To School Elsewhere to Get a Real Education

John McWhorter has received many hundreds of emails from people who are dismayed with the Woke dismantling of American Education. Here is a recent communication he received, redacted to protect this person and published at It Bears Mentioning, McWhorter's Substack Website, part of an article titled, "If I like it, it's data; if I don't like it, it's "anecdata." No - whether you like it or not, it is neither dim nor racist to generalize on the basis of widespread and frequent events (i.e. both cop killings and Elect abuses)." McWhorter introduces this communicating by noting that this person had been "accepted into a graduate program at a prestigious institution."

It hurts so much that I have to decline your offer and several other great offers that I have received from elite universities and programs that used to be the dream schools for young people like me. I am simply very frustrated by ideology masquerading as objective science in today's higher ed. particularly humanity fields. Universities these days are trying to make young people like me feel guilty because we are white and because the whole system is filled with white racists, and me included. There is such strong moralization in the academy that is so certain that it has Science on its side in all of its proclamations. Frankly, today's academy’s ideological dogmatism is one of my major fear and hesitancies for entering it. I fear any work I do, especially in developmental or evolutionary psychology, would be evaluated not on its merit but instead on what is perceived as my politics based on how politically convenient my findings are. I have decided to move to [foreign country] to join a group of very creative and young [subject area redacted by me] on a [ibid.] research project. I want to spend the last 5 years in my 20s on something scientific, not political. But it seems that it is simply impossible to accomplish that goal in my own country.

Continue ReadingNo Thanks, [Formerly Prestigious American University]. I Need to Go To School Elsewhere to Get a Real Education

Woke Mob Smears Glenn Greenwald for Asking Obvious Questions About Gallop Poll Offering New LGBT Data

It's a sad day when it is no longer acceptable to publicly ask the same good faith questions that any reasonable person would (and should) ask in private when fascinating new data becomes available on the topic of LGBT.  Glenn Greenwald explains exactly why he was interested new Gallop Polling data. The backlash against him for asking his common-sense questions is baffling.  Greenwald introduces his video: 

To explore the dynamics of this strain of mob conduct, address some of the good faith criticisms from yesterday, examine the substantive questions I believe are raised by this new polling data, and emphasize what I did and did not say about these questions yesterday, I recorded the video below, roughly 40 minutes in length.

Continue ReadingWoke Mob Smears Glenn Greenwald for Asking Obvious Questions About Gallop Poll Offering New LGBT Data

Michelle Goldberg’s False Claim that Opponents of Critical Race Theory are Refusing to Debate

At the New York Times, Michelle Goldberg dishonestly proclaims the following:

But the right, for all its chest-beating about the value of entertaining dangerous notions, is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory. It wants to eradicate them from public institutions. “

Fallacy Number One occurs in Goldberg's first three words. Goldberg knows full well CRT's critics include a large diverse group of people that includes conservatives and moderates, but that is not all. Opponents of CRT also include enormous numbers of people who consider themselves to be liberal on numerous issues. These many liberals fiercely oppose the CRT centerpiece: "fighting racism" by simplistically classifying people by color.  Goldberg and her favorite type of social justice warriors seem not to understand basic psychology and U.S. history. Classifying people by color is so incredibly off-the-mark, inefficient, hurtful and nationally dysfunctional that the U.S. fought an entire Civil War to end it, enacted a comprehensive set of civil rights laws to prosecute it and designated a National Holiday in honor of Martin Luther King in order to move forward with functional and kind-hearted ways to judge each other: by evaluating each others' content of character. The idea of moving past skin color as a way to judge each other was originally a liberal idea and this are now embraced by people across the entire political spectrum.

Fallacy Number Two. Goldbert states that "the right . . . is rarely interested in debating the tenets of critical race theory," citing to Christopher Rufo's statement: "“Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life.”  Goldberg's claim is that critics of Critical Race Theory refuse to debate this issue. She makes this claim despite the fact that Rufo has been vigorously debating CRT on Twitter for the past year.  Further,

Rufo has also presented his views in the Wall Street Journal.  But perhaps Goldberg was referring to another prominent critic of Critical Race Theory, Glenn Loury? If so,

A longer version of Loury's statement is here:

And is Goldberg consciously ignoring this invitation by Coleman Hughes to debate Ibram X. Kendi? 

Or is Michelle Goldberg forgetting another (liberal) critic of CRT, John McWhorter who has shown that Ibram Kendi is incapable of honestly acknowledging McWhorter's precisely articulated critiques of Critical Race Theory?

If this is the kind of debate Goldberg seeks, bring on John McWhorter v. Ibram Kendi!

Goldberg is making her claim about the supposed refusal to debate while CRT's other rock star, Robin DiAngelo is busy grabbing exorbitant speaking fees for private events only.  DiAngelo has avoided any and all debates regarding her defective and destructive ideas.  In 2019, her speaking fees were $10,000-15,000.  And see here. How do I know that she has refused to debate her ideas in a public forum?  I invite you to run the following Google search: "robin diangelo debate."  You will not find any evidence that DiAngelo has ever subjected her ideas to public real-time scrutiny.

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Continue ReadingMichelle Goldberg’s False Claim that Opponents of Critical Race Theory are Refusing to Debate