Michael Shermer <ick, spit> put out a call for an article for his worthless magazine defending CRT, and complained that no one would defend the theory (he didn’t look very hard, I guess). Aaron Rabinowitz answered the call and volunteered.
CRT, and what I believe is the moral panic surrounding it, is something I’ve written about in the past, so I reached out to Mr. Shermer, who told me he already had a CRT overview article “that mostly summarizes the history of the movement going back to its postmodernism roots (and before)”, which he described as “mostly neutral, albeit slightly critical on the consequences of accepting fully the belief in system racism by POC.”
Would you like to read this “mostly neutral” article? Don’t bother.
I later found out that that “article” is actually the CRT chapter from James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose’s book Cynical Theories, two individuals who played a significant role in developing and mainstreaming the CRT moral panic.
You all remember James Lindsay, right? There’s a man descending into oblivion, recently banned on Twitter. Here’s all you need to know about Lindsay.
At the time, in 2018, Lindsay insisted he was a “left-leaning liberal,” a fellow traveler of the erstwhile anti-woke collective that once called it itself the “Intellectual Dark Web,” and he was praised and promoted by some of its leading figures as an important and brave public intellectual.
But in 2022, he’s a Trump-supporting, Big Lie-espousing, vaccine-denying, far-right bigot who thinks Sen. Joe McCarthy “had it right” and “didn’t go nearly far enough” during his infamous (and near-universally repudiated) witch hunts of suspected communists during the 1950s.
And, perhaps most notably, he helped popularize the “Ok Groomer” epithet (and hashtag) on Twitter, feeding the right wing’s moral panic about LGBTQ teachers.
Right. That’s the guy Shermer believed to be a credible and objective source. Sort of says it all, I think.
Rabinowitz was working on the piece, communicating with Shermer on the content as it progressed. He’s a stronger man than I am, because if I got a message like the one below where Shermer brags about being a “social liberal” and promoting his own crappy book, I would have noped right out of there, even before I found out where his sympathies actually lie.
Then, predictably, Shermer abruptly pulled the plug on the article. You won’t find it in Skeptic magazine.
But good news! Rabinowitz got it published in The Skeptic, a UK magazine which isn’t a Shermer vanity rag. You definitely should read that rather than our corrupted American version. Rabinowitz is quite clear in naming some of the most rabid of the CRT opponents, and curiously, they’re all people who have have been prominently featured in Shermer’s magazine and podcasts.
While Rufo has received the lion’s share of credit for inciting the CRT moral panic, Lindsay et al’s anti-woke activism served as the social and ideological springboard for the CRT moral panic, because it gave the impression that the movement grew out of concerns expressed by self-identifying heterodox liberals. Shermer even personally promoted Lindsay and Boghossian’s grievance studies appearance on Joe Rogan, an episode full of easily debunked misinformation.
Given these facts, CRT activists might reasonably conclude that it would be harmful to lend credibility to an outlet that could use it to offset further unsupported attacks. That was certainly my largest concern in deciding whether to write this piece, which was originally commissioned by Skeptic Magazine in response to my conversation with Shermer. Ultimately, I lean towards engagement, even when the chance of persuasion is likely to be low, but we don’t have remotely enough evidence to decide on the best approach to engaging with individuals and organisations that appear caught up in a moral panic.
I believe the original question was actually something of a dog whistle, aimed largely at other critics of wokeness. It served to signal that CRT advocates can’t defend the theory, and that they are too ideologically captured to admit defeat, so they instead avoid debate entirely. Douglas Murray made this accusation explicitly in his recent interview on Shermer’s podcast, around 40 minutes in. He claims it is a major red flag that CRT advocates like Kendi and DiAngelo are unwilling to engage in public debate. In the interview both men credulously repeat one of Rufo and Lindsay’s most absurd accusations: that the woke are too fragile and fanatical to risk open debate.
I don’t consider it a red flag to refuse to debate, since there is good reason to question the efficacy of such debates. However, if you do consider it such a warning sign, it’s disingenuous not to highlight that Rufo and Lindsay also routinely deride and avoid debate, to the extent of actively blocking people who attempt to engage them in good faith. Lindsay and Boghossian have claimed that social justice advocates are such “uniformly such dreadful conversationalists” that it’s pointless to engage with them, beyond learning how to counter their tactics. How could such well-poisoning be worthy of praise when it’s coming from the architects of the CRT moral panic, yet serve as a red flag when assessing CRT advocates? I think the most plausible answer is the existence of an ‘anti-woke’ in-group bias.
I don’t entirely agree with Rabinowitz, though: I lean away from direct engagement when the opposition is actively harming people, and is already being fed at the trough of right-wing media. I would think articles, like the one in The Skeptic, that are strongly criticizing the colossally malicious agents of far-right disinformation are OK, and are the kind of engagement I would consider productive, but I would never want to promote Rufo or Lindsay or Murray (or Michael Fucking Shermer) with a face-to-face event, or one where some scumbag is using my words to promote an illusion of balance when they’re actually promoting lies and fear.
