Harvard, the New York Times, and other elite institutions say they're about the truth, but they're not. Over the last few weeks, they've been caught spreading lies. The power of Woke totalitarianism, like all totalitarianism, lies in the manipulation of language and emotion.

Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions

It's time for counter-Wokeism

by @shellenberger
AG Sulzberger, owner of the New York Times (left); Claudine Gay, President, Harvard (center); Roman L. Pérez, President, American Anthropological Association

For hundreds of years, truth, wisdom, and intelligence have been the highest values held by Harvard, the New York Times, and other elite institutions. Harvard’s slogan is veritas, Latin for the Truth. The New York Times motto is “All the news that’s fit to print,” which refers to the paper’s ambition to be an accurate reflection of reality. And the mission of many academic and scholarly associations is the same or similar to that of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), which is to “advance anthropology as a discipline of scientific and humanistic research, practice, and teaching that increases our fundamental understanding of humankind.”

And yet these institutions have all of late been caught flagrantly denying fundamental realities about humans and the world, spreading misinformation, and thus undermining their own mission. Investigative reporters have exposed a pattern of plagiarism by Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, that directly violates the university’s policy. The former opinion page editor of The New York Times revealed how employees making false claims of being physically at risk from an op-ed drove the paper’s owner to lie about the oped and force out the editor. And activist anthropologists motivated the AAA to prevent other anthropologists from discussing the biological category of sex.

It is reasonable to ask why any of it matters. There are just 1,666 Harvard undergraduates this year, most Americans don’t graduate from college, and many people already roll their eyes at the mention of the school, viewing the people associated with it as out-of-touch snobs. Most people don’t read the New York Times, and citizen journalism enabled by the Internet is increasingly challenging mainstream news media in terms of both size and influence. And academic associations are not particularly relevant or influential outside of disciplines, and anthropology is perhaps less so than most others.

But it does matter. Harvard remains America’s, and arguably the world’s, most famous premier university, with outsized influence over science, medicine, and many other fields of knowledge. The New York Times remains unrivaled in size and influence and ability to shape how people think and what people we talk about. And anthropology, with its four subdisciplines (archaeology, cultural, biological, museum), is the scientific community for legitimate fundamental knowledge of who humans are and where we came from. For these institutions to be led by individuals whose whose work has been fraudulent, who have been censorious, and who have lied about their behaviors.

What’s more, each of these examples is emblematic of what is best understood as a form of totalitarianism. It is true that life in the United States remains far from the worst of totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. But major institutions of cultural and political life are being led by people who not only hold pseudoscientific, racist, and irrational ideas, but also demand that those ideas be held and acted upon to the point of censoring, excluding, and punishing the pursuit of accurate, scientific knowledge, information, and policies in ways very similar to what past totalitarian regimes did, and to widespread cultural and political effect.

In both fascist and Communist nations, the government imposed mediocre anti-social individuals as the heads of important cultural institutions, such as universities. That is not what happened in the case of Harvard, the New York Times, or the AAA. The leaders of those institutions were, in the case of Harvard and AAA, selected from the institutions themselves or, in the case of the New York Times, chosen by the family that owns it. Over the last year, we have seen the dangers of when the government imposes censorship, and oversees disinformation campaigns. But the recent examples show the dangers of powerful institutions promoting censorship and disinformation on their own.

Sometimes, public intellectuals, journalists, and administrators pooh-pooh charges of Woke totalitarianism as an exaggeration by referring to much worse past regimes. Others will point to evidence that Wokeism has peaked and is losing power in the culture. I agree that past totalitarian regimes were far worse than today’s woke stranglehold over elite institutions and that Wokeism may have peaked.

Either way, if we are to avoid a further slide toward totalitarianism, we need to understand how it gained so much power over institutions ostensibly dedicated to values contrary to it, starting with truth, honesty, and accuracy.

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We must prevent people from voting for Trump because he attempted insurrection, the media say. But he didn't. January 6 was a riot from failed security, not a coup attempt. Claims that we must save democracy by destroying it stem from mass psychosis after years of brainwashing.

Hatred, Brainwashing, And Mass Psychosis Behind Democrats' War On Democracy

We have to break the hypnotic trance destroying our country

by @shellenberger

You no doubt saw the news that the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection on January 6.

You might have paid little attention to it because you heard that the US Supreme Court would overrule the decision, and the holidays were coming up.

But we should all pay attention, no matter your feelings about Trump, because what is at stake is nothing less than our democracy itself.

Before saying why I think that is, it’s important for you to know something:

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The media say "misinformation" is more rampant on X than on their websites, but it's not. The mainstream media got every major story of the last several years wrong. The real reason the media are attacking X is because they are losing so many readers to it.

The main sources of disinformation and hate speech are governments and corporate media. They have waged a series of hateful disinformation campaigns and spread wild conspiracy theories to undermine democracy & cover up their failures, eg Covid's origin, Hunter Biden's laptop.

Politicians, news media, and advertisers have entered into an unholy alliance to destroy X as a free speech platform.

Their desperate efforts to maintain censorship show the alarming degree to which they controlled information & thought before 2023.

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1728843511842410776?s=20

Trump can't be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection, says Colorado's Supreme Court. But he didn't. Jan 6 was a riot, not an insurrection. Behind the Democrats' turn against democracy is years of planning, including a secret effort to undermine the 2020 election.

Years Of Planning Behind Democrats’ Turn Against Democracy

War on Trump shows that the most dangerous people are often those who consider themselves incapable of evil

by @ZaidJilani & @galexybrane
Donna Brazile (left), John Podesta (center), and Rosa Brooks (right) led a 2020 scenario-planning exercise, the “Transition Integrity Project,” aimed at undermining the election.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald J. Trump cannot be on the 2024 primary ballot in the state. The Court found that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is therefore disqualified from running for president. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was originally intended to keep Confederate officials from holding office.

Yet Trump has never been criminally convicted of participating in an insurrection. Even special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Trump, chose not to indict Trump under the federal statute that criminalizes inciting an insurrection or rebellion, even though this charge was part of the referral from the January 6 committee. Smith could not build the legal case to include the charge, likely because of the First Amendment issues that would come with it.

The Colorado Supreme Court skirted both due process and First Amendment concerns and chose to equate Trump’s political speech with sedition in the American Civil War that killed over 600,000 people.

It’s true that Trump has at times adopted extreme and inflammatory rhetoric, including most recently saying that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

But one need not agree with anything Trump says to recognize that in a democratic society, voters still have a right to see him on the ballot. Over one million people voted for Trump in Colorado in 2020. What will those people think when they see that judges are essentially trying to take away their right to vote for the candidate of their choice? Will they really see themselves as included in our democracy, or will they continue to lose faith in the American political system? The answer is obvious.

Democrats’ argument that Trump poses a unique threat to democracy has little basis in reality. Trump’s election denial and machinations were not qualitatively different from the actions of many Democrats. As for the January 6 riot, it was largely the result of security failures, including leaders’ alleged refusal to call in the National Guard.

The court decision comes on the heels of years of panicked warning from Democrats and their allies that it’s Trump who seeks to end American democracy and establish a dictatorship.

In a lengthy essay for The Washington Post that quickly went viral last month, Robert Kagan argued that the United States is a “few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship” led by none other than Donald Trump.

The problem with this prediction is that we already know how Trump responds to all of these things: he was president between 2017 and 2021. When, for instance, the judiciary ruled against Trump – as it did many times during his presidency – he was more likely to send a Tweet than troops.

For instance, when a federal judge temporarily paused Trump’s travel ban targeting visitors from a range of countries in February 2017, Trump took to Twitter to lament, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned.”

At the time, Trump took heat for singling out a judge for condemnation. “The President’s attack on Judge James Robart, a Bush appointee who passed with 99 votes, shows a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes and a continued lack of respect for the Constitution,” intoned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

But while Trump’s frequent verbal attacks on the judiciary may have been seen as impolitic by his critics, they ultimately didn’t amount to much — certainly not anything like an actual attack. Trump, throughout his presidency, ultimately preserved the separation of powers, and you could even argue that having an adversarial relationship between different branches of government and different parts of political society protects democracy rather than subverts it.

For instance, Kagan warns that “in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be ‘enemies of the state,’ the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.”

But if the media’s lives were unpleasant thanks to Trump, it’s hard to detect that in their pocketbooks. Newspaper subscriptions soared under the first Trump presidency, and reporters who went out of their way to antagonize the president became instant celebrities with generous book deals.

Even when Trump did take a rare tangible step against press freedom, it didn’t amount to much. When the Trump White House temporarily suspended the press pass of a reporter who engaged in a lengthy verbal dispute with an administration staffer, the courts ruled that the reporter’s due process rights were violated. Whatever names Trump called the press, there is little evidence that he used his powers as president to suppress their critical coverage of his White House.

Meanwhile, his predecessor, Barack Obama, vigorously pursued whistleblowers with the full force of the federal government. As CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out, the Obama administration “used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists . . . more than all previous administrations combined.”

One report from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard estimated that 80% of the media coverage during Trump’s first 100 days had a negative tone. That’s hardly a sign that the media was cowed by the presence of Trump in the White House, Tweets and all.

This adversarial relationship between the press and the president is good for democracy, not bad. When the media serve as handmaidens for those in power, we get less scrutiny of policies that we later come to regret – such as excessive COVID-19 policies like school shutdowns and the Iraq war.

One sign that the Republican Party would be moving in an autocratic direction would be if they stopped respecting electoral results and clung to power despite losing elections.

It is true that Trump refused to concede his own defeat, and his rhetoric helped contribute to political chaos around the election and the January 6th riot. Much of the Republican Party, too, has been reticent to admit that Trump lost that election.

But being sore losers about an election isn’t equivalent to being tyrants. Following the 2000 election, many Democrats, too, felt that Bush was unfairly made the president. Gallup polling from after that election found that “just 15% said he won fair and square.”

And, as noted above, some Democrats have similarly refused to admit defeat. While both Republicans and Democrats have a handful of gubernatorial candidates who refused to concede – Stacey Abrams in 2018 for the Democrats and Kari Lake for the Republicans in 2022 – for the most part, the parties have been proceeding as normal after defeat.

But Democrats and their allies were quick to predict that the 2022 election would produce a repeat of Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020. The Post surveyed a range of Republican candidates in battleground states about whether they’d respect the results of their election. When most of those candidates failed to respond to the paper’s questions, the Post ran the alarming headline: “Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results.”

Yet after the election came and went, every candidate except for Lake had accepted the results of their election. It turned out that it was less that the Republican Party had stopped accepting elections and more that they didn’t want to talk to the Post.

As NBC News wrote in an article shortly after the midterm election: “From Maine to Michigan, Senate to state legislature, Republican to Democrat, most high-profile candidates who fell short in the 2022 midterm elections are offering quick concessions and gracious congratulations to their opponents.”

That was a far cry from what was predicted by California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who warned in a Tweet in January 2022 that “every politician says this is the most important election of our lifetime. It may be. But it could also be the last one.”

During an appearance with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Swalwell expanded on what he meant in the Tweet. “I’m worried that if Republicans win in the midterm elections that voting as we know it in this country will be gone…if they are able to win the House, the damage they could do to permanently make it difficult to vote and to alter the way that we participate in the democratic process may be irreversible,” he said.

But Republicans did win control of the U.S. House in the 2022 election. And yet nobody thinks there won’t be another election – campaigns across the country are preparing to spend billions on it. Yet now we’re being told that maybe the next election will be the end of democracy as we know it. Why is that?

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https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1737542829185146905?s=20

Government-funded Stanford researchers said they didn't demand censorship, but they did. They even created this handy little graphic in a grant proposal. It shows how their disinformation "Incidents are routed to platform partners... for... takedowns" @mtaibbi

Last March, after @mtaibbi and I testifed before Congress, Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) said it “did not censor or ask social media platforms to remove any social media content regarding coronavirus vaccine side effects.”

That was a bald-faced lie.

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1722988472640618854?s=20

@mtaibbi While we learned that SIO demanded censorship last month, today @mtaibbi discovered, thanks to his FOIA request, that SIO had put its creepy little censorship flow chart in its own grant proposal.

In the name of "fighting disinformation," SIO spread disinformation about itself.

Crime is out of control in San Francisco because it is short 540 police officers. Now, the city's top progressive Democrat wants to cut $100 million from the police budget. The reason? He views criminals as victims and the police as oppressors propping up the capitalist system.

Progressive Democrat Calls For Defunding Police In San Francisco

City Supervisor Dean Preston calls for cutting $100 million from police budget, despite city being short 540 officers

by @shellenberger

San Francisco’s largest police district, by size and population, only has three to four officers on duty every night. In February, the city’s Deputy Police Chief told Public the city was 540 officers short, but the Department only had funding to hire 267 officers.

Now, in an interview with British journalist Freddy Sayers of Unherd, the leader of San Francisco’s progressive Democrats, Supervisor Dean Preston, has called for cutting $100 million from the city’s police budget.

Preston: What gets publicized a lot is my views around the police budget. Whether it's used well, whether it's making people safer or not.

Sayers: Because you supported defunding the police, is that fair?

Preston: I think we have a very, very bloated police budget. All kinds of waste in the police department. I mean, I could cut a hundred million dollars out of the police department.

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