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Notes -
There's a pretty infamous StoneToss comic about "what if the shoe was on the other foot", in case the whole Flight 93 Election spiel wasn't enough of an example of emergencyism on the right. So that's a true matter.
One trouble is that it's hard to tell faux emergencyism from genuine emergencies. StoneToss's author has not, notably, been shot in the back of the head. Hillary Clinton has not driven an aircraft into a government building. Trump has not been lynching any academics.
At the same time, anti-immigration activists reasonably expect a mass amnesty and citizenship drive, since that's what immigration maximalists say that's what they want, and see 10m-40m new citizens as making their positions untenable for a generation directly, in a self-reinforcing way. Trump fans -- and even haters -- can notice that the man was nearly assassinated, had several other serious assassination attempts, and had every other available stop pulled to try and prevent him from having a fair election, including a court order to not count already-cast ballots. Japanese Internment was driven in no small part by the Ni'ihau incident and it doesn't take a paranoid schizophrenic to think about the military ramifications, super-predator theory had a burgeoning set of extremely shocking juvenile violence, there were actual paid-by-Soviet communists even if McCarthyism didn't seem to care about focusing on them, so on.
I'm probably the softer side of the anti-academics. My positive vision for the future involves shoveling the contents of academic journals through an LLM, checking responses for phrases like "The fact that nobody on a team that includes both emergency physicians and biomedical engineers raised this concern suggests nobody stopped to think about it, which is a different kind of failure than not knowing", and then rubbing both the authors and reviewers' noses in it.
But I want that because I think it is an emergency for a sizable fraction of academic researchers, and there's a lot of people who want to go quite a lot further.
And then on the gripping hand, it's very unlikely that Ni'ihau would have generalized to an entire genetic populations, super-predatory theory didn't even have a good model for what was driving juvenile violence and was directionally wrong about what the future held (even if the revisionist take is depending on statistics that are massaged to hell and back), and McCarthyism postdated actual bad acts like the Rosenbergs and instead seemed to focus on useful idiots being useful idiots. Dilulio's estimates of 30k hyperviolent inner-city youths would have been bad, but it would have been the 1980s-bad, not The Purge. An alternate universe where Trump got Kirk'd on national television is a worse one, but it's worse in the sense of civil wars rather than worse in the sense of the conservative project being over.
The failure mode for the academics is reduced funding, loyalty oaths, and Kolmogorov complicity. Ignoring for now how much the same specific people say isn't a big deal for their opponents, this isn't the end of the world.
Which, to be fair to the emergencyists, isn't their red line. And there clearly should be red lines: no matter how much 'the constitution isn't a suicide pact' turned into a really stupid applause light, both as a matter of law and morals, everyone had principles that aren't their ultimate principle, and yet still matter. I'll pick up litter, but I won't run across highway traffic to do so. I'll oppose being rude, but I won't shoot someone solely for being rude.
Meanwhile, it's easy to show how everyone else is drawing unprincipled exceptions that only cover their own or limit their enemies, or taking legal formalism to extremes, and very hard to notice when you are yourself.
I dunno. It's a category that reals, but it doesn't really illuminate.
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