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You might recall that an adjunct professor was let go from Hamline University after a Muslim student complained about a depiction of the prophet Muhammad shown in class. The immediate responses were not terribly surprising to me. Given past incidents, I assumed that college administrators would have an interest towards affirming the student's complaint, no matter how unreasonable it was. This panned out, with the university president issuing a very bizarre statement where she presented non-sequiturs like:
What do the demographics of the university president have to do with academic freedom? Fuck if I know.
Similarly, I also assumed that non-profit organizations would have an interest to bolster their profile by seizing upon the incident. This too panned out, with the local Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) chapter condemning the professor as Islamophobic. The local chapter's executive director even dismissed the fact that the professor went out of her way to add a content warning and said "In reality a trigger warning is an indication that you are going to do harm."
Since then, things have changed. First, the national CAIR organization felt the need to step in and rebuke the local chapter, and issued a (tepid) defense of the scorned professor. Then, Hamline University faculty just voted overwhelmingly (71-12) to ask the president to step down. For a defense of freedom of expression, the statement they issued is (at least on its face) pretty good.
Both of these developments surprised me, and it made me wonder whether this is a sign of a potential turning point on the topic of suppressed freedom of expression on campus.
If it is, it's only the most mild of turnaround, aided by the professor being genuinely careful and sensitive about Islamic sensibilities. Genuine academic freedom would include the ability to say, "yes, I am an Islamophobe, and the Muslim reaction to this situation has amply demonstrated why". I cannot imagine such a statement failing to elicit firing, blackballing, and maybe even a civil rights investigation.
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Yes, standard accusations of Islamophobia. But also:
-Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations
I didn't know about these comments before and they seem even worse in context:
The Chronicle seems to be the only place that printed this quote, and I'm really curious why the audio/video was not released anywhere else.
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Based Chris Rufo demonstrates how to deny the heckler’s veto.
I have to give credit where credit is due and say that's an admirable display of conduct from Rufo. I wish he'd spend less time with Chinese cardiologist insinuations and more on what the video showed.
Great link, in terms of actually digging down instead of flinging talking points. My take is that Rufo is comfortable fighting fire with fire, getting dirty with the hogs, etc. He can also shower off and don a 3 piece suit for the Harvard set.
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My impression of Rufo is in line with my impression of De Santis: these guys are getting soft-balled. It's almost staged. Not to say they aren't sincere or competent – they are – but it's not some political brilliance to flip the board (of trustees), it's making use of available resources in an allowed way. This woman in the video is blatantly trying to overstep her authority with a two-bit safetyist sermon based on a low-effort anonymous threat, she's a predictable villain of the week, and she's alone – physically at least. This also suggests that conservatives who got heckled out of colleges and demonized within the prestigious discourse were drooling morons who couldn't navigate their own spaces. I guess this looks plausible today to some (e.g. Hanania), but it hadn't been the case during the slow purge. So how come they lost so hard?
The hard stuff is not politely standing your ground before an old crone who wags her wrinkly finger and tries to make you feel like a naughty child – though I suppose for decent prosocial people (as well as for simple folk with poorer impulse control than what a snake in a suit like Rufo can display) that may be hard too. It's withstanding pressure in tens if not hundreds of dimensions; from direct physical intimidation and obstruction, to your own family beginning to feel shame for you, to business boycotts, to vilification coordinated by large orgs who can rope in public icons, to actual legitimate decrees, to plain apathy of your network which is sane, myopically, and so doesn't feel like fighting such an uphill battle is worth the effort.
Manipulation of procedural outcomes relies not so much on high-IQ plays as on slow march through the institutions and seizing control over many nodes at once, to the point it's redundant. When you know that there's at least one friendly Board above any Board that your enemy may coordinate to seize, it's hard to lose. Unless you decide to throw the match, or implode from within.
Conservatism in America has never been about fighting hard . Conservatism is inherently defensive (negative vs. positive rights). This puts the right at a disadvantage against the left. For the right to succeed, it needs the status quo to change. It cannot just force change.
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I understand your point, but disagree. I felt kinda bad posting Rufo dunking on the Karen president, particularly in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, but I also feel like we've seen tons of well-meaning administrators cave to the forces of safetyism and pearl-clutching in order to prevent certain views from being aired.
But there's kind of a structural bind here: if Karen wants to come back from this setback, she needs to go, ultimately, full Charlie Hebdo. There are of course many steps in that direction. But Karen now needs to pray for violence in order to prevent speech. Yet -- where security and safety are truly concerns, one may host debates in highly secure environments.
That's just another layer of the onion. The same "well-meaning administrators" would not respond the same way to similar threats against talks pushing opposite views. Such a threat would not be used stop the threatened talk, and would instead be used as an excuse to crack down on opponents of those views. This is what makes the tactics asymmetric; it's why right-wingers can't just send in anonymous threats (through the obligatory nine proxies) to put a stop to leftist talks.
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Perhaps like the mainstream media: at the start of Fox News it did lean left, though not as heavily. Fox drew a lot of right-wing people which made the media be perceived as even more left-leaning, combined with the polemics against this which also drove conservatives away into their own networks because the rest of the media was seen as a leftist province. Polarization begets polarization.
There is a difference of course: conservatives didn't run away from school altogether. So why the rout? Well, I suspect that's where civil rights law and DEI initiatives come in. Cons could still go to schools, and still go to less "woke" subjects but the university's social policy had to be subject to Title IX and other "woke" laws (shaped by ideology in spaces dominated by the left and enforced by administrators who may have been woker than the median professor) and, especially, how the government du jour interprets them.
If anything, what makes Rufo and DeSantis effective is that they understand that part of the game is about the law and changing institutions, not just dispositional concerns that other, more left-wing critics of cancel culture raise which boil down to "just stand your ground if the cancellers come for your employees" or "maybe only cancel really bad people guys!"
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Helps when you're a member of the college's board of trustees.
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Chris Rufo is so clearly the rising star of the new-republican party. The guy is smart, knows how to hit back against his main ideological opponent in the woke & seems to be raking in the cultural wins one-after-another. He has an elite educational background while also living around west-coast liberals. Yet somehow, De Santis and republicans seem to trust him.
I don't necessarily agree with him, but watching him navigate these seemingly unwinnable fights and come out on top is fascinating.
I see him get called out for straw-manning & being a bad-faith actor, but his videos pretty much come across as a 'fight fire with fire' approach. The worst things people have to say about him, also apply to his ideological opponents.
Like him or not, he is interesting to follow.
I think his conduct in the video above is commendable but I still think he's too often a bad faith actor. One example happened after the spat between DeSantis and Disney, where Rufo jumped in to mention that a Disney employee has been arrested for child sex crimes at least once a year for the past decade, omitting that Disney employees 190,000 people and how that would compare to an average baseline.
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I don't think he's bad-faith, inasmuch as he's pretending to be something that he's not. He's openly a right-wing culture warrior, and he details exactly how he fights without reservation. When he was placed on the New College board by DeSantis, the NYT accused him of staging a "hostile takeover" of the school in order to roll back the "long march through the institutions" that had made such colleges left-wing bastions. His response was, essentially, "yes, that's exactly what I'm doing".
He's also strangely scrupulous for a culture warrior, refusing to engage in "groomer" rhetoric like his compatriots. Definitely a guy to watch for, as most people in his space develop acute Twitter Brain and self-immolate before they can have any sort of meaningful political impact.
Yup, he's a clear political operator.
It's a strange category error when leftists cite him saying "Do X to win" (e.g. make sure parents associate woke ideology with CRT or vice versa) as if it's him using a logical fallacy in a formal debate or in a philosophical paper. As if political maneuvering hasn't always included this (see the conveniently named "Don't Say Gay" bill which deliberately picks the less controversial LGBT minority as the target and ignores anything else)
It might also reveal something about the mindset of political operatives on the Left: they seem to believe that they win via socratic dialogue and good faith and that similar tactics to Rufo's (or even ones much bigger in scope) aren't being used.
Suffice it to say, I'm sure their enemies are equally skeptical of them.
Committed leftists tend to use a reasoning process which finds the at very least plausible, logical extrapolation of a particular position and see if it violates any well established sacred values. They then declare it illegitimate if it does, and by extension declare illegitimate anyone who might raise it. Ex: If X is claiming blacks are unequal, and he's not claiming that this is the result of white actions --> there must be something fundamentally flawed with black people. People claiming there are fundamental flaws with black people, and by extension that race is a useful proxy for eliminating flawed traits must be racists. There are obvious discrepancies in outcomes. QED: Conservatives are racists. QED: Conservatives are evil and not legitimate critics, they are racists.
It's the Emperor's new clothes, if no one was allowed to mention the nakedness of the emperor and some people had convinced themselves they weren't alluding to it even when they obviously were. Apologies for the spelling errors, I'm drunk.
I saw a lot of this sort of thinking on those EA forums that were linked over the Bostrom controversy. It's a fundamental problem with collectivist, authoritarian thinking. They can't just accept a descriptivist fact, it must be twisted into a prescriptivist dictate.
I mean if I tell you, hey that pitbull is charging for your child - there's a gun in the car, I technically haven't made any policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, it's pretty obvious what basic widely shared moral intuitions demand that you do with those facts. This is why I bring up the emperor. In the real world, your emperor being deluded enough to fall for invisible clothes implies that him and/or his advisors need to be removed from power and there's no way around it.
The general atmosphere of seemingly paranoid fear among the blue tribe is totally legitimate. In this country, the kulaks never lost their guns and blue tribe subjected millions of their children and it's own (Columbia students ride the subway too) to disgusting conditions... for nothing. What is mind-boggling for me, having recently realized what this is in fact what we were doing and defected to the other side is finding that the dog-whistles we were worried about weren't dog whistles at all, and that there are only marginal elements in the red world interested in doing anything about it's subjection.
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It's funny that I see a lot of criticism of him from other people who also criticize wokeness in the same way.
I think significant portion of those critics* are those who broadly agree with his ideological opponents except on a few issues or tactics and therefore are obliged to hate Rufo for working with The Enemy, even though that's basically the only way to achieve anything when one of two political parties is totally opposed to your positions.
Truth be told, there's a class of homeless leftists who I think are a) jealous that he can have an impact, b) have been browbeaten into ineffectiveness by the constant leftist smear that they're further right than they are and, unlike Rufo, aren't willing to bite the bullet and c) scared that by doing so he's empowering the right wing to achieve their other ends (e.g. weakening public schooling)
Ultimately, they're politically irrelevant, clinging on to some self-serving, slave morality definition of "good faith" in spite of its inertness on a policy level. I can see why they're resentful; they can't work with Republicans cause that's a no-no in today's polarized world, but their own side has cast them out as witches. Meanwhile Rufo is using all of their critiques** and winning.
* We know why his direct opponents don't care for consistency.
** I remember Katie Herzog being furious when Rufo (rightly) responded to a trans-skeptical feminist's accusation that he was appropriating their arguments without giving respect by pointing out that the feminists had either totally failed to hold the line on gender identity issues or had actively abetted the problematization of their own hard-fought privileges and so didn't deserve much respect anyway. Having the argument means nothing if you constantly lose or fold; Rufo was going to have to come up with the central piece -winning- on his own anyway, so it's a bit much to demand laurels.
You've hit the nail on the head. As much as I like B&R, Katie's comments on Rufo sounded more like jealously than disagreement. Katie has suffered some of the worst ostracization, while also having the least disagreements with her bullies on most issues. The lady was practically chased out of Seattle. It is natural for her to feel like she deserves the most credit, since she was the one who suffered most. Of course, your willingness to suffer quietly & ineffectively has nothing to do with who gets rewarded once the tide starts turning back again.
It's funny, because Katie's own co-host has written about a similar type of resentfulness from the monetary perspective. The good non-woke-liberal journalists rejected Substack to 'stick by the ingroup's rules', but were instead rewarded with paltry wages & editorial suppression at big media. On the other hand, the sub-stackers 'played dirty' by not following institutional rules, made $$$.
From the POV of on-the-ground impact, Chris Rufo is doing to the 'substack liberals', what the substack liberals did to institutional journalists from a monetary POV.
Harsh, impolite & more accusatory than was necessary....but fair.
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Here is the reference to this
Thanks but - side question- does Nitter just not ever work for anyone else?
nitter DOT net is based in Germany, and German instances seem to work worse for me. I use nitter DOT 1d4 DOT us which works pretty well. There is a list of public instances at https://xnaas.github.io/nitter-instances/
Interesting - your comment reads "twitter dot com is based in Germany," but I assume you wrote "nitter dot net is based in Germany,". A side-effect of the Nitter option in user settings?
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Yes! Although it seems to vary from day to day for me. One day it will load fine or after a couple of refreshes, the next day it just won't load no matter how many times I refresh. Now if it doesn't load after the third refresh I just cave and replace twitter.com with twitter.c0m like the quitter I am. I know I could change my account settings back to not redirecting, but nitter really is so much better when it works.
Edit lol I am dumb
I self-host my own instance, hadn't had issues since.
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Twitter's API has been throttling lately. Just keep hitting refresh periodically.
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Tends to work for me, but if it doesn't work for you there is a profile setting to not update the links to nitter.
Ah, that there is. Thank you.
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This story is noteworthy because it happened to a professor; hardly anyone cares or talks about people who get fired from other professions for stupid, arbitrary reasons. Just as profs are at the mercy of students, other employees are at mercy of customers complaining, bosses, etc. It's like work is not fun and workers are in a precarious position and must be on their toes. Also, one must keep in perspective how uncommon this is. There are over 200k people employed in higher ed in the US in depending if you count full vs. part time, adjust vs. tenured, etc. --it's a lot.
But on the other hand, the notion of academic freedom is considered to be inviolable, which I guess is why these stories get so much attention despite being so rare. It also has a chilling effect, so it's not entirely isolated even though it's uncommon. I think only tenured profs are protected.
I'm not speaking on this particular incident because I don't know enough details, but a lot of these people who get shoved out ceremoniously are in a precarious position for a reason totally unrelated to the incident--workplace feuds, poor performance, being a weirdo in a general undefined sense, etc. Then management or HR will take some arbitrary unsubstantiated claim and kick them out. This is pretty common in the mid and higher ranges of bureaucracies and probably makes up a lot of woke firings IMO.
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This reads to me more like a story of Islam liberalizing than one of academic freedom. Freaking out over pictures of Muhammad isn't cool, makes Muslims look bad, and isn't what Islam is about. I can't help but notice the low-class, unsophisticated Somalis of the Minnesota chapter getting put in their place by the high-status, cosmopolitan Arab Muslims of the national CAIR.
Andy Ngo is notoriously opaque with his news commentary but I think the point he is trying to convey is clear when he posted a video of Muslims burning a Danish flag in protest of the guy who burned a Quran. I imagine the reaction to burning a Danish flag is a shrug, and so whatever point the Muslim protestors thought they made just ends up further exposing how alien their incomprehensible rage is.
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What made this even worse is that the pictures were not modern Western depictions, they were mediaeval Persian ones and respectful. They were included in the class as part of having art history not be European-centric. Whatever about the Somali Muslim student (and this may have been her trying to get more political traction as often people involved in student body activism like this are hoping for a career in politics eventually), the response of the administration was beyond stupid. The Dean of Inclusiveness shouldn't even be a job in the first place, and by rushing a dumb statement as he did, should have been booted out on his backside. That the president fell into line and fired the professor is even worse. They didn't even bother looking at the case, they just caved in to some little madam instead of telling her that she's supposed to be a young adult and is going to university to get an education about the broader world and history, not to stamp her feet like a toddler.
I'm not one bit surprised any adult Muslims were embarrassed by this, it's not about "high-status cosmopolitan", it's about "do you want to make us all sound like we haven't a brain in our heads?"
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Yes, the issue with drawing Prophet Mohammed is one of the more embarrassing things for secular Muslims.
Try as they might, there's really no pretending that this isn't an Islamic problem - Hindu nationalism is its own issue but no one kills Frenchmen over it - and one that can't be boiled down to economics or geopolitics (which amount to blaming America)
It's thus a place where Americans are less likely to be sympathetic.
It is interesting though; to see such pragmatism in activists. I guess it reflects more of a sense of vulnerability on Muslim activists compared to others.
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I wonder if this is connected to the general trend of Islamic countries becoming more secular than before (see this and this), for example.
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It's better than the opposite happening for sure. Although I think the whole depicting the prophet, at least in the states, isn't an establish route of canceling. Or at least if you want to establish a pattern can you find a past successful canceling over something like this?
If not outright "cancelling," it's the source of extreme skittishness. There's the famous instance of South Park intentionally poking at this issue (https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Muhammad) by including Muhammed amongst a group of superheroes. This episode cannot be found on HBOMax, Comedy Central or the official South Park website (run by Comedy Central).
My priors are that anyone who doesn’t vociferously apologize and try to make some costly signal of disowning the person who decided to depict Mohammed is laying a trap in some way.
In this particular case, you'd be disowning two people who lived in the 14th and 16th centuries.
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I find this an incredibly confusing take. I just find those people to be cowards, it's a much simpler reasoning. What trap are the setting?
edit: It's impossible for me to believe the group of who broadly support piss Christ, which I support too in its being legal and allowed if not very artistically interesting, have some kind of hang up of unnecessarily offending religious people.
It's okay to offend Christians, particularly in the American context, since as we know they are all bitter clingers, racist rednecks with guns and Confederate flags who want to round up all the gays for torture conversion camps. They're the white majority so they're in power and it's punching up. Anyway, this is art and it's not your fault if the knuckle-draggers can't tell the difference.
It's not okay to offend other faiths because they are non-white, non-majority, and have been oppressed by the Christians in the past (Crusades, the Holocaust) and you can show how tolerant and inclusive and virtuous you are by supporting them and being good allies.
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‘Hang up of unnecessarily offending religious people’ isn’t how I would describe my mental model of these people- more like genuine fear of terrorism coupled with a twinge of guilt about treading on the feelings of brown non-Christians.
On the other hand red tribers who hold Mohammed drawing competitions then stand around with their guns ready for an attack.
It's in the rational self-interest for someone who feels they will have a guaranteed place and privileges (even under a society of 'enemy') to feel a genuine fear of losing them because they sided with the 'enemy' too enthusiastically.
Yes, that's what you'd expect supply-side political action to look like. It should be revealing that the demand-side tribe's guns all belong to the supply-side tribe, this is why military organizations code red.
The meta-level of "Blue tribe's enemy is Red tribe, Red tribe's enemy is external" is "the demand-side tribe's enemy is the supply-side tribe, but the supply-side's enemy is external". Which is why the supply side's tactics are confrontational to things that code "external" (as in, that one should not say anything because their political enemies could get violent) in a way the demand side's aren't.
Uh, do you mind restating your thesis in smaller words? It’s clear as mud and maybe defining your terminology would help.
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I, uh, assume the "trap" involves the "fuck around and find out" strategy of dealing with angry people who try to do something about the depictions, a la that incident at an art museum where a shooting was stopped by another guy with a gun.
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IDK anything about a trap (or really what that guy meant), but I don't see them as cowards. That's just not the hill they want to literally die on. Someone who cared more about free speech might well decide to risk death on that hill though, and that's commendable.
If you're in a land where it's illegal and surrounded by people who suspect you're with the guy whose depicting the big Moh, sure self preservation yourself. If you're in the united states and no one is even asking you, and your reasoning for doing it is to avoid offense, yeah, that's not the same situation.
Who are we talking about here? I think the college president can't come out and say "that's dangerous," but she doesn't want to risk her staff, so she instead says that it's offensive. Maybe she's good at doublethink and has even internalized that. In the end we probably agree but I think there's still an element of danger (if much smaller) here in the US as well.
However, the backdrop is that the State (and the local social majority) won't back her up. Which is why regime-aligned speakers who threaten her staff all the same do not get shut down when a threat comes in.
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Followed by a two parter where Tom Cruise wants to steal Muhammed's 'goo', which ended with comedy central censoring the image of Muhammed and bleeping the entirety of the boys' ending monologue (which explained the magical power of violence).
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