More Attacks on Universities
An attempt to connect higher education and political violence.
I wrote most of this post before my post, entitled Centering My Thoughts on Kirk’s Assassination. If any reader is interested in my basic thoughts on the entire situation, that is the place to start.
There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote “diversity,” they actually enforce a uniformity of thought, denying tenure to dissenters.
Here is where I note in passing that Weiss and her colleagues all have college degrees, and somehow managed to escape without being turned into Marxist zombies.
But the real issue here is that the statement about hostility to debate does not stand up to scrutiny.
Kirk’s entire business model was predicated on Turning Point USA chapters on college campuses and, more importantly, touring college campuses himself to engage in interchange, in public, with students.
I don’t think madrassas allow Southern Baptist clubs to be formed by their students, nor do they allow traveling Evangelical preachers to swing by for a public forum.
As Moynihan notes:
Kirk built his political organization, Turning Point, via a series of chapters on college campuses. Kirk and Turning Point mastered a new political economy of campus conservatism. Members used debate with controversial speakers who generated attention. They also engaged in sophomoric stunts and had members who trafficked in overt racism.
Kirk and Turning Point were a pain in the ass for universities, a source of disquiet. Nevertheless, universities largely welcomed — or at least tolerated — Kirk, and allowed his organization to operate on their campuses. Kirk died at a university-organized event, part of a Fall tour of university campuses. He was engaged in a peaceful discussion in front of a thousands of students when he was killed by someone not affiliated with the campus. It is impossible to square these facts with the claim that “America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate.”
Emphasis mine. What else is there to say?
Kirk was not only able to visit these campuses, but he also sold tickets to his events and used video from the events as fodder for his social media, which is also part of his business.
So, rather than being banned from campus, he was able to leverage visits to campus to make a living.
You know, like how jihadi madrassas work.
I would note that a lot of this plays into a post from G. Elliot Morris at Strength in Numbers, People are more likely to support partisan violence when they think the other party does too.
when leaders express support for partisan violence, followers are likely to adopt that belief. Some will even act on it.
But the other thing that will inevitably happen if these surrogates keep saying Democrats are the “Party of Murder” and need to be destroyed is that Republicans will inevitably think of the Democrats as more violent than they are in reality. The share of Republicans who think most Democrats support partisan violence will increase sharply.
According to this paper I link to in my Friday column […] political violence is a psychological arms race, with neither side wanting to be caught flat-footed against the opposition. Nobody wants to bring a pen to a gunfight. This is a natural instinct when you come to view your political opponents as an opposing tribe threatening to wipe you out. People are saying, “Hey, well, if they want to hurt me, I might as well hurt them back.”
In other words, citizens take cues from leaders. If leaders tell their followers that the other side is violent, those followers are more likely to believe a threat exists. The more people see a threat, the more likely they are to react to their opponents with violence, including preemptive violence.
The study also showed that if you correct misperceptions about the other side, support for violence decreases.
In the experimental study on violence linked above, scholars tested support for partisan violence before and after one group of respondents received information about how many people in the opposition party also supported it. As established, most people dramatically overestimate that percentage.
But what happens if you then correct survey respondents on their misperception? Compared to a control group that got no corrective message, support for partisan violence was between 40% and 80% lower among the treated group (that got the corrective statement).
This is why things like Trump’s initial speech (and continuing rhetoric) are a massive problem. It’s why having the AG, the VP, and talking heads on Fox News accusing “the left” of violence is a problem. And it is why attacking universities like they are intolerant places that radicalize students into becoming violent is a dangerous lie.
Or why pieces like this by Breccan F. Thies in The Federalist are abhorrent: We Can Give No Clemency To The Assassination Left.
Let’s start with the fact that there is no “assassination left.” While yes, it is possible to find people on social media who have said some awful things in support of Kirk’s murder, the reality is that, as best as I can tell, the entire force of elected Democratic politicians has condemned the killing. And even “liberal” networks like MSNBC have been quick to overcorrect for possibly bad reactions due to what people on their air say (see the firing of Matthew Dowd).
As Elliot notes in his post, social media distorts the way we look at each other, but the responsible thing for people with huge platforms like Donald Trump, JD Vance, Pam Bondi, and Jesse Watters, to take a breath before making vague, catch-all claims about “the left.”
Some of the outrage from the Federalist piece underscores both how bad leadership makes all this worse, as well as the way in which ambiguous social media posts can deepen divides.
The spreaders of this rhetoric are not fringes of the far left. These are the rank-and-file, and we know that because Democrat members of Congress jeered at the idea of a moment of silence in the moments after Kirk’s death on the House floor.
This notion is derived from the included tweet from Representative Ronny Jackson (R-TX):
If you watch this clip, which I did twice and then some, what you will see is roughly a minute of the entire chamber observing a moment of silence and Speaker Johnson asking why a member from Colorado was seeking recognition, and then some disruption takes place. Here’s the deal with the tweet: you can’t tell what is going on, and the first 53 seconds of the clip utterly undercut what Jackson claimed was in the clip. It does not justify what Thies wrote about the incident.
Sharing a country with people like this is untenable. It is too late to turn the temperature down. Without resorting to violence, Americans need to pursue complete and total dominance of those who would cheer Kirk’s death, egg on more violence, and justify it away later.
Here we have Jackson spreading a narrative that is then picked up by right-wing writers, who then mix it with the emotion of the moment to turn up anger against other Americans who are not responsible for what one man did.
I did more research than Thies did and can provide more context than Jackson did. What happened was that after almost a full minute of reverent, silent prayer, Representative Boebert (R-CO) stood up and stated that “silent prayer gets silent results” (take that, God!)* and requested someone pray aloud for Kirk. This is what caused the hubbub on the floor. But, of course, Fox News decided to add a bit more fuel to the fire and showed the clip from the point, which ignored the silent prayer that preceded it. The prayer that no one objected to.
I would note, to his credit, that Paul did not take the bait. Note, too, that Paul noted having been on college campuses with Kirk (you know, those places that don’t allow people to speak).
Thies has a solution.
Trump already called for a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) investigation into far-left billionaire George Soros for funding “agitation” — or worse. While Soros is well-known to have a network of organizations that attempt to subvert American society, the depth of this issue obviously does not stop at Soros.
The groups, communication systems, networks, logistical programs, and the rest need to be uncovered and eradicated, root and branch. They need to be treated as terrorist organizations. As Blaze Media host Auron MacIntyre said, we need “lists, names, raids, action, no excuse.”
The FBI needs to identify, subvert, and prosecute all Antifa and similar cells, and work with social media companies under threat of a criminal charge.
There is something utterly nauseating about calling for “lists, names, raid, action, no excuse,” especially when the supposed perfect illustration of the problem is a lie about what happened on the House floor.
Keep in mind: this was written with no knowledge of motive or of any evidence of any kind of broad threat. But the rhetoric from top members of the Republican Party has been to foment this exact kind of response.
So, yes, it concerns me when this rhetoric gets localized into specific groups, like university faculty. It is a way to guarantee more violence. And Thies attacks universities in the piece, and also a subheading in the piece declares, “Democrats Are The Party Of Political Assassinations.”
It seems important to recall that there has been political violence perpetrated against Democrats as well (Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, and another State Senator and his wife were shot). And there was this event at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, that was decidedly not a Democratic affair, but was instead an insurrection mounted to stop the election process.
And there are things like this that rather undercut the notion that the Republicans are peaceniks.
I would note, too, if you don’t want to be accused of acting and sounding like a fascist, that perhaps the first, best step is to not act and sound like a fascist.
To return, as I do far more than I wish was the case, to Stanley’s How Fascism Works, we see that clear attempt at the politics of Us v. Them. Republicans and many of their media allies are rushing to take this moment of national tragedy and blame it on the other side.
The bit about what happened on the House floor is a combination of unreality (the description does not fit what happened, whether we are talking about Jackson, Thies, or FNC) and FNC is clearly acting propagandistically with the way it edited and reported what happened.
And the ongoing attacks on universities fit directly into the notion of anti-intellectualism.
And, of course, there is the law and order angle.
These are all chapters in Stanley’s book, as I noted here.
We are in a very bad moment in our national history and it is beyodn disgusting that the administration and many of its media allies are willing to exploit a murder in this way.
I remind us all, again, that Socrates was executed for the sin of corrupting the youth because he taught things that challenged the accepted orthodoxy. I think this story needs to be front of mind as we hear right-wing agitators attack higher education.
A dangling note worth mentioning: As it pertains to university campuses and whether or not a lot of what we have seen in recent years really is the left being intolerant, I would recommend (also via Moynihan) this piece by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber from 2023: Conservatives on campus.
The big shift from the bespectacled bowtie model of campus conservatism to the frenzy of Turning Point USA and rampaging groypers wasn’t a reaction to Wokism-Out-of-Control, as Hoffman maintains. It was a product of a national level shift in the organizational political economy on the right, as national conservative groups perceived possible political advantage from stirring stuff up more on campus. This doesn’t mean that outraged reactions from left students aren’t part of the story. It means instead that they feed an independently existing organizational machine that wants them to be outraged, and will go to increasingly extreme lengths to make sure that they are outraged. Quoting Binder and Kidder:
“provocations are often very much part of the design … Elliot Kaufman, a former conservative activist from Stanford University, for example, acknowledged in an op-ed for National Review that “The left-wing riots were not the price or the downside of inviting Yiannopoulos—they were the attraction.””
There may well have been some attempts by left-leaning groups to use the heckler’s veto against right-leaning groups. But the degree to which these groups have sought to generate that response via provocation is worth keeping in mind.
*Dare I note Matthew 6:5: ““And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.”
Seems like a motto for our times. Attacking universities is right out of the autocrat’s playbook.
This bothers me for a couple of reasons.
First, I have so far seen no evidence presented of the shooter being “left” except on the one issue, and the linked Bulwark piece presents none. If he is left on one issue that affected him personally, that does not mean he “moved leftward” any more than when my then senator, Rob Portman, changed his mind on gays because his son came out. Maybe the shooter was a leftist, but it would have been nice to see some evidence before the consensus set in.
Second, this is very much a case of the GOPs defining Dems. There are trans activists in the Dem Party, but I doubt most Dems rank it as a major issue. I suspect most Dems regard other people’s sex lives as private, and for the most part, none of the governments damn business beyond high school athletic associations and whoever sets medical standards. It’s a major issue only because Republicans made it a major issue. They did it to trap Dems. And it’s a good trap. We would like to see people treated decently, so we really don’t want to throw people under the bus. Prez candidates don’t seem to be allowed to say, “I’m going to be busy enough dealing with Russia, China, restoring ties with Europe, Asia, and the rest of the Western Hemisphere, the economy, the environment, justice, immigration, and whatever crises turn up. Next question?”
@gVOR10: The “left” thing is based on something his mother is reported to have said.
Having said that, I am trying very hard not to ascribe any motives and might have even tempered that statement you quoted if I had written it today.
We are being given an incredibly carefully chosen collection of facts about Lance Twigs (if that is in fact his real name*), and people are making all sorts of assumptions based on that.
For instance, Twigs is reported to have posted to /r/4tran and /r/4tran4. This is typically presented without context. The similarity in name to 4chan is not a shockingly weird coincidence. It is not remotely a lefty space.
It’s like reporting that someone has a fondness for alt-history, and neglecting to explain that this information was gleamed from their posts on Stormfront.
Not all trans people are on the left — look at Kaitlyn Jenner. Or the femboy/catboy that Nick Fuentes was either dating or “dating” (what is done for real, and what is done performatively for the “lulz”? Not bothering to guess. Was the femboy trans, or a cis man who just likes thigh high stockings? Dunno, we’re off into crazy land once they are hanging out with Nick Fuentes)
Based on the logic of the Bulwark Boys, Nick Fuentes would be on the left. There’s a decent chance a random guy on a date with another man in thigh high stockings, makeup and cat ears is on the left, but if you look closer, you will begin to notice details that don’t make sense, and which might to tell another story.
The fine folks from the Bulwark who you link to may be fine folks, but they are old cisgender heterosexual white men who don’t travel in these circles at all and aren’t prepared to deal with anything remotely complicated.
Also, everything @gVOR10 said.
The Bulwark Baddies are right to mock the people coming up with conspiracy theories based on the texting style of the carefully released texts. They’re damn weird but the shooter is a 22 year old in Utah, raised by a sheriff — the weirdness of referring to vehicles and squad cars and other bits of cop speak is definitely explicable. The full sentences… eh, some people are just literate. It’s good to be skeptical, since everything we are getting about those texts is filtered through known liars, but it’s far more likely to be very selectively released rather than just made up.
(There are a couple of spots in what was released that sound like weird exposition dumps for an audience that are stating things the roommate would know. It’s not quite “Since you’re my brother and an ornithologist…”, but odd. But people repeat things for emphasis all the time, and they don’t have editors going through trimming out irrelevant crap)
But the Bulwark Bombasts** are making a number of logical fallacies in using that to discredit everyone who does’t think Twigs is a lefty, including using that as evidence that Twigs is a lefty.
*: There is no evidence that Twigs has chosen another name, and plenty of circumstantial evidence that they may have reservations about a masculine name like Lance.
**: I am beginning to regret the choice to use alliteration.
——
ETA: @Steven L. Taylor: I’d point out that the mother an old conservative is trying to figure out what happened to her son, in a world where the mainstream Republican Party is demonizing trans people. Having a trans roommate may itself be evidence of being “on the left”.
I’d want more details before putting any weight on that statement. At least some statement about the shooter’s views on universal healthcare, housing policy or some other boring, run of the mill lefty issues.
——
ETA2: and now to read everything in the post after the first paragraph. (I skimmed briefly)
Having read the rest of your piece far more closely now, I’m amused that the first responses to your post that’s largely on insidious right wing lies and/or partial truths being repeated and used to try to close down all discourse are about an insidious right wing lie and/or partial truth you (in good faith) repeat in what’s basically an aside.
(It’s insidious — it’s designed to slip in and become part of the common assumptions, either deliberately crafted or just through a survival of the fittest beating out three other bits of bullshit)
People are fundamentally not prepared to deal with a reality where there is such a relentless spin on everything. The level of vigilance required is completely unnatural.
Even the fine folks at the Bulwark are almost certainly repeating it in good faith, and are not trying to use it to direct anger and hatred towards a marginalized group.
The attacks on universities and uncooperative media is just another part of this, trying to destroy people’s ability to keep the lies, half truths and other misinformation at bay.
I don’t think they give a shit about the violence, it’s about destroying institutions and practice of independent thought.
“Do your own research” is great advice once they’ve made sure people don’t know how to do their own research, and have flooded the world with shit.
Now just pondering what completely incorrect and insane ideas I take as gospel because it slipped past my guard because it came from trusted sources leaning left, and fit with my worldview at first glance.
There are whole subjects where I won’t look at anything because the amount of propaganda and misinformation overwhelms facts and good faith estimates, and I don’t trust my abilities to find good data.
I pity any lay person who is trying to figure out whether vaccines are generally safe. And I pity my brother any time the Clovis people are mentioned — he’s going to end up believing in Lemuria before too long, and it’s not as cute as it sounds (it is not, for instance, an empire dominated by fuzzy little lemurs). And I probably even pity my other brother who has decided to have a TV turned to Fox News rather than a personality.
Have we dealt with this before? How did we go from yellow journalism to a vague notion of roughly reasonable news? Or was yellow journalism widely overblown in American history?
@Gustopher: Here’s all I was trying to say, but appear to have failed: those on the broadly-defined right, especially the pro-admin types will use any hint of trans-ness or any hint of left-ward-ness as an excuse to make a big deal out of it.
This is all I was trying to say.
I am not saying I know what the motives were, or what little breadcrumbs we have been given actually mean.
@Steven L. Taylor: I hope you didn’t think my remark on the “move leftward” thing was aimed at you. I assumed you were quoting, well nearly everybody.
Sometimes I wonder if such folks have indeed been turned into Marxist zombies. Not in the absolute sense, but in the relative sense.
Context matters — especially of the intra-personal sort.
Imagine the counterfactual in which they not been indoctrinated by humanities adjuncts and graduate RAs.
@gVOR10: I took no offense–mostly just wanted to make sure I was clear on my intent.
@Mimai: Are you suggesting that all of this is a reaction to attempts at indoctrination by some humanities adjunct?
And should I be reading this comment in the tongue-in-cheek font or not?
If university students were going to bring the revolution, it might have happened many years ago.
Unless the revolution was scheduled for Saturday morning. 😉
In reality, the majority of students now, as ever, seem to be somewhat left-of-centre, if pressed on their opinions, but generally rather more concerned with their own lives and prospects and studies than political activism.
The MAGA inclination for a war upon academia is really rather silly, but also worrying.
It really does recall the inclinations of Nazis and Bolsheviks to purge education of “the enemies of the people”.
Perhaps they can look to the Taliban for an example of how to do this?
@Mimai:
As I’ve remarked before, one of my tutors was so far left, they’d need to build a whole new wing to accomodate his Overton Window.
Yet he never attempted to indoctrinate anyone (apart from on the iniquity of the university charging campus car parking fees, lol).
He and I repeatedly butted heads over aspects of Russian history and the early Cold War.
Yet I got quite a few A or A+ grades from him.
He was, in fact, a damn good teacher.
The US right (and, for that matter, some on the left) seem unable to process the possibility that political opinion does not automatically override academic integrity.
@JohnSF: Amongst others, the Nazis, and Italian Fascists, purged a lot of the people who understood “Jewish physics”. Didn’t work out well for them. OK, mostly for their Japanese fellow travelers, but only because of timing.
@JohnSF:
I was thinking Pol Pot.
@gVOR10:
Same.
I find it medium horrifying (more than slightly horrifying, but not an immediate existential threat to my bisexual/pansexual/whatever ass* that this assumption is everywhere, and taken … if not as fact than without a lot of questioning on the base assumptions.
Not that it would justify anything if it turned out to be the transient trans person in Transylvania who pulled the trigger.
*: I don’t bother with labels, since we will all be wearing the same pink triangles in the camps**. Garden variety faggots like myself are third or fourth on the list for this government’s focus, after trans folks, immigrants, and maybe Jews. (Fascism never works out well for Jews)
**: Also, no one can figure out the difference between bi and pansexual***. It comes down to age (pansexual wasn’t a thing when I was growing up) and flag colors (Jesus Fucking Christ**** that bi flag is ugly). And my age and flag preferences do not match.
***: A lot of people think “bisexual” assumes a gender binary, and thus prefer “pansexual” for political reasons, despite hating the flag (its printer colors, CMYK without the K). But allegedly “bisexual” was redefined in some dumb way (attraction to your own gender and other genders? Two or more genders?), in some awkward attempt to keep from changing the LGBT acronym. And so “Bisexual” which clearly was originated as meaning attraction to both men and women, is an umbrella term that includes “Pansexual” (attraction to kitchen supplies), Omnisexual (attraction to cable companies), and a variety of other nice labels.
****: I’m a little offended that iOS capitalized Jesus and Christ but not fucking. Had to fix that. Jesus fucking Christ.
@gVOR10:
The Poynting Physics Building is a place I know fairly well.
Where Pierls and Fritsch worked with Oliphant on uranium physics in 1940.
And then the fuses were lit.
Ironically, Pierls and Fritsch both being refugees from Germany, were working on atomic physics because their status as nominal “enemy nation aliens” kept them out of what were considered key areas, such as radar, coding computation, etc
@Steven L. Taylor:
Tongue-in-cheek font. Kinda sorta.
I’m not implying it’s a reaction, thus pushing them further right.
Rather, I’m floating the idea that the adjuncts and RAs were indeed effective in moving them leftward.
And this is where they ended up.
@JohnSF:
On the nose!
And I’d go even further: …that political opinion does not automatically override academic reality, by which I mean “Shit, we’re behind and must get through this material in time for the next exam/paper/etc.”
Between term paper panic, and alcohol, and romantic imperatives, politics is generally a rather lower order issue.
(And that’s just the faculty. 🙂 )