E292. The Three Whisky Happy Hour: What the Latest Hoax Teaches about Liberalism

This special end-of-semester episode features Steve and Lucretia  reflecting on the latest academic hoax that Steve highlighted earlier in the week on Power Line (here and here), and which may have contributed to Higher Education Quarterly having to retract the fake article on how “right wing money” is supposedly pushing colleges and universities to the right and intimidating faculty and administrators. The study was so ludicrous that only a liberal (and apparently the academic “peer reviewers” who signed off on the article) could have believed it.

This opens up a wider window into the question of why leftists—especially on campus—are such miserable, unhappy, and intolerant people, and why they behave tyrannically, increasingly turning our campuses into Stasi-like institutions worthy of East Germany. (Just this week, Columbia University put out a video, posted below, calling on students and staff to “report” people who use incorrect pronouns because of the “harm” and threat to safety such unpure speech acts represent. Suggestion: Why don’t we simply just call everyone “comrade” and solve everything at once.) The answer requires taking seriously the nihilism of the modern left which cannot tolerate any disagreement or challenge to their position because it threatens their very being, while conventional or moderate liberals have been swept too far by the premises of supposedly progressivism to offer effective resistance to the extreme left. Warning: Expect cameo appearances from Harry Neumann and Harry Jaffa along the way!

Note especially the passage in the middle about how “Intentionally misgendering someone by refusing to use the correct pronouns or name is a violation of the Columbia university non-discrimination policy,” and encouraging students to visit Columbia’s website if they need to “report an incident.” Campus Stasi operators are standing by!

This special end-of-semester episode features Steve and Lucretia  reflecting on the latest academic hoax that Steve highlighted earlier in the week on Power Line (here and here), and which may have contributed to Higher Education Quarterly having to retract the fake article on how “right wing money” is supposedly pushing colleges and universities to the right and intimidating faculty and administrators. The study was so ludicrous that only a liberal (and apparently the academic “peer reviewers” who signed off on the article) could have believed it.

This opens up a wider window into the question of why leftists—especially on campus—are such miserable, unhappy, and intolerant people, and why they behave tyrannically, increasingly turning our campuses into Stasi-like institutions worthy of East Germany. (Just this week, Columbia University put out a video, posted below, calling on students and staff to “report” people who use incorrect pronouns because of the “harm” and threat to safety such unpure speech acts represent. Suggestion: Why don’t we simply just call everyone “comrade” and solve everything at once.) The answer requires taking seriously the nihilism of the modern left which cannot tolerate any disagreement or challenge to their position because it threatens their very being, while conventional or moderate liberals have been swept too far by the premises of supposedly progressivism to offer effective resistance to the extreme left. Warning: Expect cameo appearances from Harry Neumann and Harry Jaffa along the way!

Note especially the passage in the middle about how “Intentionally misgendering someone by refusing to use the correct pronouns or name is a violation of the Columbia university non-discrimination policy,” and encouraging students to visit Columbia’s website if they need to “report an incident.” Campus Stasi operators are standing by!

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