Over the past two years I noticed that if any members of the academy spoke out, then they tended to be the retired older folk - the ones with nothing to lose any more. All the mid-career academics kept their mouths resolutely shut. Perhaps years of job insecurity, short term contracts, lack of tenured positions and so on, in the humanities at least, had already turned academics into frightened sheep long before to ‘rona came along.
Precisely correct. I'll be discussing the effects of job insecurity in an upcoming post. It certainly had that effect on me - the cowing is not limited to the humanities.
If an honest history of "this" ever gets written, this question of "who spoke out" will need to be carefully investigated. My sense now is that you are mostly correct in this gloss. However, there were a number of medical academics, (formerly) respected, mid/late career who did speak out. I can recall the epidemiologist at Oxford. I think Dr Malone had an academic position. The Canadian vaccine researcher at the Univ of Guelph (or Western Ontario?). There were - are - a few others.
On the Humanities side - lowly adjunct to tenured named chair? - can anyone point to any single one who actually "spoke out" other than some quiet push back to the vax mandates which did happen. Ah yes! - just now I recall a long time (female) professor of ethics at a community college in Ontario who did refuse the vax and was fired and made some powerful, indeed, tearful, videos. Presumably now she remains unable to use public transport in Canada and is effectively imprisoned there. Talk about "the exception proving the rule"!
Indeed, there were a few. The ethics professor was in fact at Western University - one of the largest institutes in Canada.
The sad reality however is that the overwhelming majority of academics have been utterly silent on this and everything else, except insofar as they have spoken "power to truth" in behalf of establishment narratives.
I have read Part 2 closely. It is a stunning indictment! Funny you should reference "power to truth" here again; I got stuck a bit on that in the last long paragraph - "oh surely, he means "truth to power"" - as is: after ALL this they are still dragging out that tired, self-aggrandizing phrase?! But I guess not - you are "turning" a phrase in a clever way.
Speaking Truth to Power has long been a staple self-labeling, self-promoting troupe among activists and leftist academics. And, seems to me, its use persisted (inconsistently) well after the assault on truth (existence of, striving towards) that you document in the opening paragraphs.
Reading those paragraphs, I got close to turning the phrase myself. You don't name names, but surely standing behind much of this is Foucault. Ha! I said, that's him in three words - there is no truth, only power and therefore we "speak power to truth" - the deluded notion of it, that is.
And so we end up here - with academics feeling oh so powerful but completely bereft of the true power of truth - which I think they may need and scramble to recover very soon - as soon as the Rulers decide they no longer need the services of compliant academics - or even no longer need their mere existence. (Are you hearing much by way of vax injuries among the professoriate?).
= =
Two more things - there is really no question of exoneration here, but it's worth mentioning that - just in terms of "Covid restrictions" placed on students, I have heard administrators claim that they had no choice; the parents were demanding restrictions of just that sort. Virtually the entire nation, after all, was in a deep psychotic trance.
Second - perhaps your approach is too "academic". Naomi Wolf (a true and inspiring hero in all this!) recently posted a piece documenting in short: the universities got tons of Fed Gov money for implementing the vax mandates and other restrictions - period! After all, the business of academia is business - and that means in large part getting your snout in the fed money feeding bins!
I didn't coin "power to truth" myself; heard it on a podcast years ago, and it stuck with me as both clever and apt.
Foucault is certainly the source of much inspiration for contemporary sophistry.
Money plays a huge role in all this. Parts 3 and 4 go into that a bit.
As to parents demanding restrictions, no doubt. Administrators are cowardly tyrants. Their modus operandi is to claim they're only doing what parents/students/professors/corporate partners/funding agencies/etc. want. There's some truth to this but in large part it's an excuse.
Apr 20, 2022·edited Apr 20, 2022Liked by John Carter
One silver lining to the Covid cloud is that the whole experience has turned over the rock, exposing the slimy underbelly of dogma enforcement to more of the public. Those of us interested in nutritional research, as one example, have noted this for years.
Thank you for these two articles in particular. I look forward to more.
Nutrition is definitely a major topic of relevance to this discussion. I find it consistently shocking that so many poisonous myths (e.g. that fat is bad, that meat causes cancer, that plant-based diets are preferable to omnivorous diets, that endocrine-disrupting seed and 'vegetable' oils are the 'heart-healthy' superior alternatives to butter, lard, and olive oil) are so damnably persistent in not only the general population, but even amongst the educated. A determined marketing campaign can embed these falsities in the public imagination to such an extent that even after decades of research have shown them to be perfect inversions of the truth, they persist.
What's truly terrifying is the looming prospect of official narratives driven by these myths taking root in the public health regulatory apparatus and forcing these unhealthy diets on everyone by means of punitive taxation.
Apr 21, 2022·edited Apr 21, 2022Liked by John Carter
We are in 100% agreement on all of that, plus cholesterol. Do you read Hyperlipid?
"forcing these unhealthy diets on everyone by means of punitive taxation"
This is already happening in a rather sideways manner through subsidies to big agriculture, making crap food the only affordable alternative for many people.
The summation of academics' failure to question the narrative re The World's Deadliest Virus™ is one of the most thorough and succinct that I've encountered.
Academia's craven support for--or silence regarding--the marketing of Th'Pandemic™ at first baffled me, then came to infuriate me. It has been particularly heartbreaking to hear my favorite radio station, MIT's WMBR, constantly air the US government's easily falsifiable misinformation PSAs, and even craft their own patently false ones to promote the experimental injections. Maybe I was naive, but I never imagined that institution could be so compromised, let alone complicit in such a despicable and damaging fraud.
It's been a long time coming. Academics have been conditioned for decades to discard logic and knowledge when social pressure dictates. The coronavirus debacle has simply been the inevitable psychotic break that persistent, habitual reality denial guaranteed.
Excellent essay. I think this part really bears repeating:
"[Students are] certainly not taught how to think, but not even so much taught what to think as simply what to feel."
The role of mandatory DIE and social justice training and seminars for new students is underappreciated I think. Firstly it defines the culture of the institution to incoming students, defining what is acceptable to do or think and what is punishable. Secondly, it defines what behaviors of faculty students should report for punishment by the administration. In other words, it trains students to be agents of administration in rooting out wrongthink in the professoriate, allowing administrators to discipline those who don't toe the line in the name of protecting and serving the student population.
Nailed it. I'd planned on covering this dynamic in a future essay. From the outside, it seems like the campus has become as madhouse due to mad professors. That's only partly true. Admin using students as a handy excuse to police the professoriate from above and below is a crucial part of how the system works.
Like everyone in the managerial class, however, admin prefers to rule from obscurity.
The great universities--West or East--were founded by great thinkers of specific dogmatic foundational beliefs, and they sure weren't hospitable to anyone they could thereby brand heretics. They too were diligent in suppressing thought they considered dangerous to the young. That's just human nature.
What's happening now is a new religion attacking the older ones. Admirers of the great myths of the North surely recognize how hard Christian intellectuals worked to slander as "pagan" anything that deviated from authorized Christian doctrine (which is a fuzzy term of course, considering the number of Christian sects).
The mistake was in thinking any school of thought could be characterized as religious or secular. Anyone believing strongly in anything creates a god and a bible to bolster it.
This mistakes a recurring phenomenon for a permanent and foundational one. The academy's roots are in Athens, not Jerusalem, and it was founded on a basic openness to argument and evidence. That it has periodically been suborned by religious fanatics is neither here nor there as to its basic nature and purpose.
Academia certainly failed on the corona front, but how much of it was due to DIE, and how much was due to ordinary human hypochondria and cowardice? Or maybe it was precisely DIE that allowed the cowardly hypochondriacs to run the show (as the latest victim group, I suppose)?
I think the punishment of heresy normalized by DIE programs was pretty powerful here. Censoring scientific debate as misinformation or disinformation was applauded by many academics, and it is hard to imagine that happening before it became normal to get your fellow professors fired for heresy with regards to DIE. Support the narrative or get out, regardless of the topic du jur.
Precisely correct. The witchfinder-generals of the Church of No Salvation first accustomed academics to biting their tongues, initially on one subject, then on more; starting with small things, and expanding on from their. Habit formation is a powerful thing.
Over the past two years I noticed that if any members of the academy spoke out, then they tended to be the retired older folk - the ones with nothing to lose any more. All the mid-career academics kept their mouths resolutely shut. Perhaps years of job insecurity, short term contracts, lack of tenured positions and so on, in the humanities at least, had already turned academics into frightened sheep long before to ‘rona came along.
Precisely correct. I'll be discussing the effects of job insecurity in an upcoming post. It certainly had that effect on me - the cowing is not limited to the humanities.
oops! - right! - you will be in the history! - You are speaking out - thank you.
If an honest history of "this" ever gets written, this question of "who spoke out" will need to be carefully investigated. My sense now is that you are mostly correct in this gloss. However, there were a number of medical academics, (formerly) respected, mid/late career who did speak out. I can recall the epidemiologist at Oxford. I think Dr Malone had an academic position. The Canadian vaccine researcher at the Univ of Guelph (or Western Ontario?). There were - are - a few others.
On the Humanities side - lowly adjunct to tenured named chair? - can anyone point to any single one who actually "spoke out" other than some quiet push back to the vax mandates which did happen. Ah yes! - just now I recall a long time (female) professor of ethics at a community college in Ontario who did refuse the vax and was fired and made some powerful, indeed, tearful, videos. Presumably now she remains unable to use public transport in Canada and is effectively imprisoned there. Talk about "the exception proving the rule"!
Indeed, there were a few. The ethics professor was in fact at Western University - one of the largest institutes in Canada.
The sad reality however is that the overwhelming majority of academics have been utterly silent on this and everything else, except insofar as they have spoken "power to truth" in behalf of establishment narratives.
I have read Part 2 closely. It is a stunning indictment! Funny you should reference "power to truth" here again; I got stuck a bit on that in the last long paragraph - "oh surely, he means "truth to power"" - as is: after ALL this they are still dragging out that tired, self-aggrandizing phrase?! But I guess not - you are "turning" a phrase in a clever way.
Speaking Truth to Power has long been a staple self-labeling, self-promoting troupe among activists and leftist academics. And, seems to me, its use persisted (inconsistently) well after the assault on truth (existence of, striving towards) that you document in the opening paragraphs.
Reading those paragraphs, I got close to turning the phrase myself. You don't name names, but surely standing behind much of this is Foucault. Ha! I said, that's him in three words - there is no truth, only power and therefore we "speak power to truth" - the deluded notion of it, that is.
And so we end up here - with academics feeling oh so powerful but completely bereft of the true power of truth - which I think they may need and scramble to recover very soon - as soon as the Rulers decide they no longer need the services of compliant academics - or even no longer need their mere existence. (Are you hearing much by way of vax injuries among the professoriate?).
= =
Two more things - there is really no question of exoneration here, but it's worth mentioning that - just in terms of "Covid restrictions" placed on students, I have heard administrators claim that they had no choice; the parents were demanding restrictions of just that sort. Virtually the entire nation, after all, was in a deep psychotic trance.
Second - perhaps your approach is too "academic". Naomi Wolf (a true and inspiring hero in all this!) recently posted a piece documenting in short: the universities got tons of Fed Gov money for implementing the vax mandates and other restrictions - period! After all, the business of academia is business - and that means in large part getting your snout in the fed money feeding bins!
https://dailyclout.io/universities-receive-incentives-for-covid-19-vaccine-mandates-federal-government-money-favors/
On to Part 3 - thanks!
A lot to respond to here.
I didn't coin "power to truth" myself; heard it on a podcast years ago, and it stuck with me as both clever and apt.
Foucault is certainly the source of much inspiration for contemporary sophistry.
Money plays a huge role in all this. Parts 3 and 4 go into that a bit.
As to parents demanding restrictions, no doubt. Administrators are cowardly tyrants. Their modus operandi is to claim they're only doing what parents/students/professors/corporate partners/funding agencies/etc. want. There's some truth to this but in large part it's an excuse.
The Plandemic was a script and academics were supporting actors
First part, yes. For the most part, though, academics genuinely bought into all of it. They weren't acting.
One silver lining to the Covid cloud is that the whole experience has turned over the rock, exposing the slimy underbelly of dogma enforcement to more of the public. Those of us interested in nutritional research, as one example, have noted this for years.
Thank you for these two articles in particular. I look forward to more.
Nutrition is definitely a major topic of relevance to this discussion. I find it consistently shocking that so many poisonous myths (e.g. that fat is bad, that meat causes cancer, that plant-based diets are preferable to omnivorous diets, that endocrine-disrupting seed and 'vegetable' oils are the 'heart-healthy' superior alternatives to butter, lard, and olive oil) are so damnably persistent in not only the general population, but even amongst the educated. A determined marketing campaign can embed these falsities in the public imagination to such an extent that even after decades of research have shown them to be perfect inversions of the truth, they persist.
What's truly terrifying is the looming prospect of official narratives driven by these myths taking root in the public health regulatory apparatus and forcing these unhealthy diets on everyone by means of punitive taxation.
We are in 100% agreement on all of that, plus cholesterol. Do you read Hyperlipid?
"forcing these unhealthy diets on everyone by means of punitive taxation"
This is already happening in a rather sideways manner through subsidies to big agriculture, making crap food the only affordable alternative for many people.
Yep. If they can't convince everyone that their factory made poison is healthy, they'll just price everyone out of real food.
Bizarro world
Superb, thank you.
The summation of academics' failure to question the narrative re The World's Deadliest Virus™ is one of the most thorough and succinct that I've encountered.
Academia's craven support for--or silence regarding--the marketing of Th'Pandemic™ at first baffled me, then came to infuriate me. It has been particularly heartbreaking to hear my favorite radio station, MIT's WMBR, constantly air the US government's easily falsifiable misinformation PSAs, and even craft their own patently false ones to promote the experimental injections. Maybe I was naive, but I never imagined that institution could be so compromised, let alone complicit in such a despicable and damaging fraud.
It's been a long time coming. Academics have been conditioned for decades to discard logic and knowledge when social pressure dictates. The coronavirus debacle has simply been the inevitable psychotic break that persistent, habitual reality denial guaranteed.
Excellent essay. I think this part really bears repeating:
"[Students are] certainly not taught how to think, but not even so much taught what to think as simply what to feel."
The role of mandatory DIE and social justice training and seminars for new students is underappreciated I think. Firstly it defines the culture of the institution to incoming students, defining what is acceptable to do or think and what is punishable. Secondly, it defines what behaviors of faculty students should report for punishment by the administration. In other words, it trains students to be agents of administration in rooting out wrongthink in the professoriate, allowing administrators to discipline those who don't toe the line in the name of protecting and serving the student population.
Nailed it. I'd planned on covering this dynamic in a future essay. From the outside, it seems like the campus has become as madhouse due to mad professors. That's only partly true. Admin using students as a handy excuse to police the professoriate from above and below is a crucial part of how the system works.
Like everyone in the managerial class, however, admin prefers to rule from obscurity.
Civil defense still exists.
It just went private sector.
https://tacda.org/
https://poetslife.blogspot.com/
https://poetslife.substack.com/p/famers-markets-solution-to-american
I'd say this piece is a little dishonest.
The great universities--West or East--were founded by great thinkers of specific dogmatic foundational beliefs, and they sure weren't hospitable to anyone they could thereby brand heretics. They too were diligent in suppressing thought they considered dangerous to the young. That's just human nature.
What's happening now is a new religion attacking the older ones. Admirers of the great myths of the North surely recognize how hard Christian intellectuals worked to slander as "pagan" anything that deviated from authorized Christian doctrine (which is a fuzzy term of course, considering the number of Christian sects).
The mistake was in thinking any school of thought could be characterized as religious or secular. Anyone believing strongly in anything creates a god and a bible to bolster it.
This mistakes a recurring phenomenon for a permanent and foundational one. The academy's roots are in Athens, not Jerusalem, and it was founded on a basic openness to argument and evidence. That it has periodically been suborned by religious fanatics is neither here nor there as to its basic nature and purpose.
Academia certainly failed on the corona front, but how much of it was due to DIE, and how much was due to ordinary human hypochondria and cowardice? Or maybe it was precisely DIE that allowed the cowardly hypochondriacs to run the show (as the latest victim group, I suppose)?
I think the punishment of heresy normalized by DIE programs was pretty powerful here. Censoring scientific debate as misinformation or disinformation was applauded by many academics, and it is hard to imagine that happening before it became normal to get your fellow professors fired for heresy with regards to DIE. Support the narrative or get out, regardless of the topic du jur.
Precisely correct. The witchfinder-generals of the Church of No Salvation first accustomed academics to biting their tongues, initially on one subject, then on more; starting with small things, and expanding on from their. Habit formation is a powerful thing.