Totalitarian Manipulation Of Language Behind Woke Destruction Of Harvard, New York Times, And Other Elite Institutions
It's time for counter-Wokeism
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 is troubling and dangerous.
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 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.
Sex, Lies, and Racism
