Or how universities work. If they did, they’d see that this short video illustrates a perfectly normal, routine event. Someone asks to make an announcement in an MIT math class, waits politely for the professor to let them go, and then leads students in a chant as they march out of the classroom.

This is a math class this morning at @MIT. This is the state of learning and ‘free speech’ at our top universities. It would not be happening without a failure leadership at MIT.

Imagine being a student who borrowed $250k to attend MIT or a professor who is trying to do… pic.twitter.com/w8C6Y6i3SU

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) November 10, 2023

Oh yeah? So?

I’ve had students ask to announce an anti-abortion talk in my class. I am ferociously against that idea, but I let her speak…then I continued on.

I’ve had a student raise a hand in class in order to inform us all that there was a talk by a creationist in a local church that night. Fine. I wasn’t able to go to that one, but I’m sure it was entertaining.

I had students announce a protest march against the Iraq war…oh, wait, I agreed with that, and joined the march that afternoon.

I’ve had advocates for climate change protests, BLM, conservation, vegetarianism, gay & trans rights, etc. take a moment to make announcements in class. It’s fine.

I can’t emphasize enough how totally unremarkable this sort of thing is. Our students have diverse views, we’re at a goddamn university, and we encourage students to be aware, to be activists, to express themselves. What I see in that video is a tolerant professor giving a minute of time to let students voice their opposition to an ongoing violent political event, and they then left to protest.

And now assholes are showing that short clip and announcing that “wokeness” has gone too far, that anyone they disagree with is abusing free speech. I am unimpressed. I take that back — I am disgusted.

This country has a weird cognitive impairment — we keep forgetting that we’re full of fascists. Our history is loaded with openly bigoted authoritarians who preach their garbage to widespread acclaim, and when the their raging Naziism gets smacked down hard by reality and events, we just blithely forget their sins to keep them on their pedestal.

I am reminded of this every time I fly out of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. The main terminal is named after Charles Lindbergh, the famous pilot who also just happened to be a white supremacist, an America Firster (AFC), anti-Semite, and, until the stories of atrocities started to trickle out of Europe, a Nazi sympathizer.

While the AFC garnered significant support from middle- and upper- class American gentiles, their highwater mark came on Sept. 11, 1941, when Charles Lindbergh gave a speech at an AFC event in Des Moines, Iowa — a speech that left the permanent stain on his memory to this day.

“The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration,” Lindbergh said, before going on to add later about Jewish-American groups: “Their greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government,” and that they were the only ones who wanted war over the resistance of the American public who did not.

We know he was an anti-Semite. We still put up statues honoring Lindberg. Where’s a neurologist when you need one?

Seth Cotlar provides a long list of the stuff we’ve forgotten.

We as a nation absolutely did not have to go easy on the memory of Kirkpatrick or Elizabeth Dilling, or Gerald LK Smith, or Henry Ford, or Charles Lindbergh, let alone put that last guy’s name on airport terminals. Normalizing such people as mere “anti-communists” or “fundamentalist Christians” or “ultraconservative patriots” or “principled isolationists” was a mistake. So was minimizing them as irrelevant “kooks” or “crackpots.” Both impulses did a real disservice to the nation’s political memory by weakening our antifascist defenses and atrophying our pro-democratic muscles. Gerald LK Smith, for example, had a mailing list of over 3 million names in the 1960s. The Liberty Lobby’s neo-Nazi radio show could be heard on over 470 AM radio stations in that decade. Calling these folks “crackpots” did nothing to stem the torrent of fascist bile they poured into the reservoir of our political culture on a daily basis, bile that was generally ignored as irrelevant by the vast majority of Americans and interpreted as perfectly normal, “patriotic, pro-Christian, anti-Communist Americanism” by the millions of people to whom it appealed.

It was the rare public figure in the Cold War era who would have either a) forthrightly labeled such people “fascists” or b) taken the anti-democratic threat they posed seriously enough to pay much attention to them. Because these fascists were white, because the majority of them were elderly, because the rank and file of these movements was working or middle class, because the wealthy people who funded these fascist movements were usually respected “upstanding citizens,” because most of them were Christians, because they called themselves “patriotic lovers of the Constitution;” all of their violent ideation, all of their hateful bigotry got written off as eccentric personality quirks, rather than features of an organized and enduring fascistic strain in American politics.

I blame the deep scars of the Civil War. In 1865, we were in such a mad rush to “heal” the damage of the war that we papered over the criminality of the Confederacy, and it just became a habit. We have never addressed the poison of racism and anti-Semitism in this country, which allows the infection to persist and flourish, and now it has completely taken over the Republican party.

I have to correct the statement below.

You cannot be a responsible teacher or researcher if you tolerate lies and demonstrably false ideas.

There is a line we have to draw where we openly repudiate bad ideas presented in bad faith. We should no more have a conference panel at a serious meeting on fallacious ideas about sex than we should have conference panels on creationism and flat earth…unless it’s to flatly reject them. And even then, that has limited utility.

Dr Ibram X. Kendi has a noble goal, combatting racism. To that end, he established a Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University that, by some metrics, was highly successful.

Since its announced launch in June 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the center has raised tens of millions of dollars from tech entrepreneurs, Boston-area corporations, and thousands of small donors.

At the time, Kendi, the author of the bestselling 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist,” said the center would “solve these intractable racial problems of our time.”

Then the complaints started. There were accusations of mismanagement, that Kendi was unreachable, that all that grant money wasn’t being effectively used.

The organization “was just being mismanaged on a really fundamental level,” said Phillipe Copeland, a professor in BU’s School of Social Work who also worked for the center as assistant director of narrative.

Although most decision-making authority rested with Kendi, Copeland said he found it difficult to schedule meetings with him. Other staffers described paralysis in the organization because Kendi declined to delegate authority and was not often available.

Say it ain’t so! I’d want to see evidence that the center was being run poorly.

In recent months, Kendi had been on leave from the center, according to BU.

He returned last week and, in a series of Zoom meetings, told approximately 20 of the center’s staffers that they would be laid off, according to Spencer Piston, a BU professor and leader in the center’s policy office.

The layoffs “were initiated by Dr. Kendi” and represented a strategic pivot, not a response to any financial difficulty, Lapal Cavallario said. The center will now pursue a fellowship model “rather than its current research-based approach,” she said.

Uh, OK. Authoritarian mass firings and a complete redirection of how the center would be run is strong evidence of mismanagement, I would think.

Since Henry Ford was also a rich anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer.

The Washington Post continues it’s depressing dissection of Ales Hrdlicka. I wish we could say he was a forgotten relic of a benighted time, but no, some anthropologists were still celebrating his life in more recent years.

Rachel Watkins, a biocultural anthropologist, worked at the Natural History Museum in the early 2000s after the Smithsonian had reckoned with what he had done in Larsen Bay. She recalled when employees at the museum gathered around a cake to commemorate the anthropologist’s birthday more than 50 years after his death.

“He was … deified,” said Watkins, now an associate professor and department chair of anthropology at American University. “It’s like Thomas Jefferson at [the University of Virginia].”

Ugh. The old ghoul should be treated as a shameful embarrassment, but instead he’s lionized by some now as much as he was in life (he died in 1943). This newspaper article from 1926 is incredible, not only for how credulous the journalist was,but for how smugly and confidently Hrdlicka makes predictions about the future evolution of the American population — don’t worry about the flappers, they’ll be strict parents.

(You can click on this to get an enlarged article that is marginally readable.)

The modern white nationalists and racists didn’t just appear out of thin air. They’ve been here all along, provided with pseudo-scientific support from establishment scientists like Hrdlicka.

You knew this had to be coming. Matt Walsh, the know-nothing pundit who got mad attention for asking “what is a woman?” and insisting on a fundamental distinction between the sexes, all to justify his hatred of trans people, is airing a different idea now: white supremacy, white extinction theory, the whole kit-and-caboodle of racist Nazi dog whistles. He’s promoting Great Replacement Theory now.

There are really two parts of this story. The first is the story itself, which is the demographic trend where whites are trending towards extinction in the United States. Like, that’s the way it’s headed. And then the other part of the story is the veil of silence around this issue, the wall that is erected around it. And I know you’re gonna say, well, you just read a story about it. So it’s not a silence. They can report on it. So you report and you celebrate diversity, and then you just move on. We don’t talk about it. We don’t think much about it, and that’s it. You aren’t allowed to talk much about it. You certainly – you certainly can’t be concerned about it. You’re not allowed to express any concern. That’s unthinkable. To hear that whites are on their way to minority status and the white population is declining, the worst that you could possibly do is – to talk about it at all is already a problem, but to suggest that there’s any reason at all to be concerned about that, or to be anything less than thrilled by that development is incredibly racist, we’re told.

Notice how the first two thirds of that paragraph are to set up the idea that he’s being persecuted, that no one is allowed to say these stupid words, and how society is policing your thoughts. That’s essential to his strategy, that you consider that his claim is so obvious and strong that people need to censor it even before he makes it. He’s not even going to consider that his great idea is so stupid and indefensible that intelligent people are already tired of hearing it.

People who identify as white are declining in proportion to those who identify with other ethnicities. That’s it. That’s all that is happening. There is no extinction. No one is being “replaced.” It’s how biology works — our species reproduces by mingling DNA between pairs of individuals, so everyone is a hybrid of their parents. It’s also a product of arbitrary cultural biases: if a white person has a child with a non-white person, there is no more loss of identity than if they had a child with a white person, but because of bigoted attitudes, the child is considered non-white. So of course, by definition, the frequency of “pure” white children declines with every generation, even if there is no decline in the frequency of genes contributed by white people. It’s an invented problem with no basis in reality.

Walsh continues, still feeling the need to prefix his comments with the idea that he’s a brave truth-teller that people want to silence.

We know that it’s — like, it doesn’t even need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway because we all know that’s true. But we know that the continued existence of any other race of people is considered deeply important. And the preservation of the historical and traditional racial identity of any nation is considered deeply important. You know? So, for example, if there was an influx of white immigration to a historically Black country, and that was resulting in a giant demographic shift wherein it was becoming a predominantly white country rather than predominantly Black, this would be considered a major, major problem. And there’s no doubt about it. And yet, in the reverse, it is either neutral or cause for celebration. But really it should be a cause for celebration.

Uh, yes — the continued existence of people is important. I’d also add that preserving unique cultures is also valuable. That is not something to worry about here, because the American historical and traditional identity is not at risk, nor are any white individuals. The culture is thriving and expanding as more people contribute to it, which is what you expect of a healthy evolving population.

He seems to have confused what is happening in the US to colonialism, where an external culture invades, takes over, and works to eradicate the native population … you know, like white Europeans did to the native populations of the Americas. That’s what’s really at the root of his problem, though. He thinks that they will do to us what we did to them. Except that’s not applicable: there is no alien “they”. “They” is us. Immigrants are joining us, not conquering us. The white population is diminishing in relative frequency, not because “they” are murdering us, but because we’re happily having consensual sex with each other.

As usual, he then goes off with half-assed distortions of biology.

And you know what? This pertains even to the the animal kingdom. I mean — think if there’s a particular type of, I don’t know, hummingbird that’s going extinct. Even for that, we’re supposed to panic. And if I were to say, hey, whatever. I mean, what does it matter? We — so we don’t have that of hummingbird. We got plenty of other hummingbirds. What does it matter what type of hummingbird it is? What difference does it make? So, yeah, this type of hummingbird is — there’s more of that then there’s less of this. Like, who cares? If I say that, I’m callous because, no, it’s very important that we have all varieties of hummingbirds. Every variety is very, very important. We have to keep them all around. Every part, every animal in the animal kingdom, we gotta keep them all around. It’s extremely important. If any particular variety starts to dwindle, if any particular type of species of animal gets driven out of its territory, it’s a very bad thing. So, it’s interesting that we can see this with hummingbirds, but not with certain kinds of people — well, in particular, one kind of person, which would be white person. The preservation of the hummingbird community is more important than the preservation of the white race.

No. Just no. Race and species are not synonyms. The analogy falls apart from its onset, and is in fact an extremely common trope among racists. I won’t take it apart word by word because that job has already been done: read Human races are not like dog breeds: refuting a racist analogy by HL Norton et al. Here’s the abstract.

In 1956, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane posed a question to anthropologists: “Are the biological differences between human groups comparable with those between groups of domestic animals such as greyhounds and bulldogs…?” It reads as if it were posted on social media today. The analogy comparing human races to dog breeds is not only widespread in history and pop culture, but also sounds like scientific justification for eschewing the social construction of race, or for holding racist beliefs about human nature. Here we answer Haldane’s question in an effort to improve the public understanding of human biological variation and “race”—two phenomena that are not synonymous. Speaking to everyone without expert levels of familiarity with this material, we investigate whether the dog breed analogy for human race stands up to biology. It does not. Groups of humans that are culturally labeled as “races” differ in population structure, genotype–phenotype relationships, and phenotypic diversity from breeds of dogs in unsurprising ways, given how artificial selection has shaped the evolution of dogs, not humans. Our demonstration complements the vast body of existing knowledge about how human “races” differ in fundamental sociocultural, historical, and political ways from categories of nonhuman animals. By the end of this paper, readers will understand how the assumption that human races are the same as dog breeds is a racist strategy for justifying social, political, and economic inequality.

Just the fact that Walsh brings this argument up is an indictment, biologists can tell you that it is rank bullshit. It’s old-fashioned garbage that I’d expect of Nazis or the KKK, but Walsh takes it for granted.

Once again, have you noticed how you don’t have to probe a transphobe very deeply before you uncover a Nazi?

I hadn’t heard of this guy, Richard Hanania, until recently — but I sure was familiar with his old pseudonym, Richard Hoste. He was one of the more hateful, obnoxious, stupid racists who was busy stuffing the internet with lies a decade ago. Now I learn, in one of the most thorough, devastating journalistic takedowns I’ve ever read that Hoste and Hanania were one and the same, and that he’s broken into the mainstream with the complicity of conservative billionaires.

A prominent conservative writer, lionized by Silicon Valley billionaires and a U.S. senator, used a pen name for years to write for white supremacist publications and was a formative voice during the rise of the racist “alt-right,” according to a new HuffPost investigation.

Richard Hanania, a visiting scholar at the University of Texas, used the pen name “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s to write articles where he identified himself as a “race realist.” He expressed support for eugenics and the forced sterilization of “low IQ” people, who he argued were most often Black. He opposed “miscegenation” and “race-mixing.” And once, while arguing that Black people cannot govern themselves, he cited the neo-Nazi author of “The Turner Diaries,” the infamous novel that celebrates a future race war.

A decade later, writing under his real name, Hanania has ensconced himself in the national mainstream media, writing op-eds in the country’s biggest papers, bending the ears of some of the world’s wealthiest men and lecturing at prestigious universities, all while keeping his past white supremacist writings under wraps.

I remember Hoste, because I’ve long kept half an eye on nasty little websites like Taki’s Magazine, The Unz Review, VDARE, the Occidental Observer, and anything linked to the Pioneer Fund. These are the places some of the most openly racist people, like Richard Spencer or Steve Sailer, let it all hang out nakedly. I’ve always marveled at how they can write such vile, repugnant articles in their safe little hugboxes full of racists, and then walk out in public without shame, even to friendly appreciation from notable academics. It’s one of the tells I recognize for closet racists — people who praise Sailer, for instance, are the kind of slimeballs who read VDARE approvingly, even if they’d never dare to write such things themselves.

Now I’m going to have to add “following Richard Hanania” as another marker for the shy racists.

You’re on notice, guys. Scuttle for the kitchen cabinets as fast as you can, the light has been turned on.

Anyway, a major data leak from Disqus has exposed Hanania’s history, and it’s interesting to see how a low-life troll mainstreamed himself and started grabbing attention and money from more respectable venues. First, he dropped the pseudonym and was writing under his real name, Hanania. Then he started writing somewhat less inflammatory, but still crackling with racism, op-eds and articles that he’d submit to big-name sites, where he’d get picked up by sympathetic editors (they’re everywhere). It also helps to cozy up to rich white people, many of whom already share his views.

The 37-year-old has been published by The New York Times and The Washington Post. He delivered a lecture to the Yale Federalist Society and was interviewed by the Harvard College Economics Review. He appeared twice on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News’ former prime-time juggernaut. He was a recent guest on a podcast hosted by the CEO of Substack, the $650 million publishing platform where Hanania has nearly 20,000 subscribers.

Hanania has his own podcast, too, interviewing the likes of Steven Pinker, the famous Harvard cognitive psychologist, and Marc Andreessen, the billionaire software engineer. Another billionaire, Elon Musk, reads Hanania’s articles and replies approvingly to his tweets. A third billionaire, Peter Thiel, provided a blurb to promote Hanania’s book, “The Origins of Woke,” which HarperCollins plans to publish this September. In October, Hanania is scheduled to deliver a lecture at Stanford.

Meanwhile, rich benefactors, some of whose identities are unknown, have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a think tank run by Hanania. The think tank doles out cash to conservative academics, and produces political studies that are cited across right-wing media.

Yes, he has a “think tank,” a term that is long past its past-due date. Hanania’s is called the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. It’s run out of his house, and mainly seems to be a drop-box for donations that pay his substantial salary. The function of CSPI is…

In addition to being a laundering service for handing out money to reactionary academics, it is a paper mill for “studies” that back up reactionary talking points, to be spun into articles and opinion pieces with headlines such as “Social trends causing rapid growth in people identifying as LGBT, report says” (from the ideological astroturfing Sinclair Broadcast Group), “The Lockdowns Weren’t Worth It” (WSJ) and “The new class war is over identity” (Washington Examiner) — the latter being an anti-LGBTQ screed that ended, “My name is Dominic. I’m a trans woman, and my pronouns are me, me, me.”

It’s a profitable gig, collecting donations from insufferable rich Republicans and shuffling it into bad publications that pollute the body politic, but there’s no “thinking” involved in a think-tank. But it paid off for Hanania! He could use that illusion of serious scholarship to work his way up the grifter’s ladder.

Hanania was making a name for himself. By 2022, he was selected as a visiting scholar at the Salem Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center — funded through right-wing donors including billionaire Harlan Crow — is led by executive director Carlos Carvalho. “I have no comment,” Carvalho told HuffPost when asked about Hanania.

Hanania was also tapped to be a lecturer for the “Forbidden Courses” program at the University of Austin, the unaccredited school funded by venture capitalists and founded by former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss, now a prominent right-wing influencer herself. The university did not respond to a request for comment about Hanania.

Earlier this year, Hanania spoke to the Yale Federalist Society, the school’s chapter of the conservative legal organization, about what the government has done to “discriminate against whites and men.” The chapter did not respond when asked for comment.

And this October, Hanania is scheduled to teach a seminar at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. The school did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.

He may be dropping a few rungs off that ladder, though. Bari Weiss has said she didn’t know him and wouldn’t have hired him if she had. Oops.

The University of Austin, founded by a group including Bari Weiss in reaction to progressive campus culture and promising freer speech, has drawn a line at the right-wing writer Richard Hanania, after HuffPost revealed that he’d written in favor of eugenics and racism under a pseudonym.

“Richard Hanania has no affiliation with UATX. He was invited once as a speaker. Like many other institutions, we were completely unaware of his pseudonymous, racist writings. Had we known, we would not have invited him,” a spokesman, Hillel Ofek, told Semafor in an email.

His invitations to speak at the Federalist Society probably still stand — they eat up the racist white nationalist stuff there. He’s probably going to face some opposition at Stanford, I hope, but you never know. Apologists for hate seem to have infiltrated many higher levels of society. You don’t have to worry about Hanania’s prospects, he was already gearing up to jump to a new grift.

Hanania mentioned all of these men [Andreesen, Sacks, Ramaswamy, Thiel] in a June Substack post while describing what he celebrated as the “Tech Right,” a new Silicon Valley-based conservative movement that, among other beliefs, embraces transhumanism and “longtermism.”

The cult of “longtermism” has swept through Silicon Valley in recent years, with Musk and Thiel among its most well-known acolytes. It’s a worldview that often prioritizes the health of future generations of humans — even ones millions of years hence — over people currently living in the here and now, suffering and getting by on planet Earth. (Musk’s goal to colonize Mars, for example, is a longtermist project.)

Its adherents are often obsessed with IQ scores and scientific racism, and the famous computer scientist Timnit Gebru has criticized longtermism as “eugenics under a different name.”

The scholar Émile Torres has also noted that longtermism’s “transhumanist vision of creating a superior new race of ‘posthumans’ is eugenics on steroids,” a recapitulation of 20th-century beliefs that ushered in “a wide range of illiberal policies, including restrictions on immigration, anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations.”

It’s maybe unsurprising, then, that Hanania has emerged as a scribe for this new “Tech Right.” After all, he had years of practice writing about eugenics as Richard Hoste, advocating for precisely those types of policies.

“The maintenance of the quality of the population requires not just a stable population at all levels but the active weeding out of the unfit,” Hoste wrote in 2011 for Counter-Currents, the white supremacist site.

“There is no rational reason,” he wrote, “why eugenics can’t capture the hearts and minds of policy makers the way it did 100 years ago.”

New grift, same as the old grift.

The rational reason to reject eugenics is, of course, that we know where it led when it captured “the hearts and minds of policy makers” over a century ago: to suffering and death and a world where an asshole like Hanania can thrive.

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P.S. I neglected to mention that another important rung on the racist grift ladder is publishing in Quillette. You will not be surprised to learn that Claire Lehman, the creepy mastermind behind Quillette, still supports Hanania.