On the September 27th edition of PBS’s Washington Week, reporters expressed barely controlled outrage about the Trump campaign’s slanderous attacks on Haitian immigrants. Why don’t seemingly racist—not to mention sexist—statements crater Mr. Trump’s support? Chiefly because when, in the eyes of professors and reporters, everyone is racist, then no one is.
Normal American voters reflexively discount charges of prejudice even when, as in Mr. Trump’s case, they seem true. Desensitization to accusations of racism is common even among minority voters, especially when statements about border security and support for the police are perceived less as racist or white supremacist and more as straightforward common sense.
This exemplifies the impacts of what Democratic commentator James Carville derides as ivory tower “faculty lounge politics,” which will intensify under a Harris/Walz administration and a Democratic Congress.
One of the few things I have in common with Donald Trump is that we have each faced accusations of racism. I’ve been called racist for being a white person, referring to Venezuela, a country led by people of color, as a dictatorship. I’ve been called racist for writing that Black Lives Matter’s attacks on policing ended up taking black lives through higher homicide rates. Most troublingly, white critical theorists called me racist for supporting President Obama’s education reforms aimed at closing achievement gaps. To critical race theorists, blacks who excel academically suffer internalized whiteness.
At my university, the grownups are in charge, so other than a few sleepless nights, I never suffered for alleged racism. Others are not so lucky.
As Eric Kaufmann shows, over a third of conservative professors report facing discipline for their views; so do one in ten liberals, often attacked by those farther left, typically for alleged racism or sexism. According to large-scale surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, most college students self-censor to avoid punishment. Faculty lounge politics have spread off campus: 48 percent of Americans fear to say what they think in the workplace, three times more than during the 1950s red scare.
Some incidents are disturbing in states like Minnesota and California, where governments back critical theorists.
Just a few miles from Governor Tim Walz’s statehouse, his fellow Minnesota public employee, Harvard-educated physician Tara Gustilo, was demoted from leading the county hospital’s OB/GYN Department for arguing that it is not racist for white doctors to treat minority patients. Superiors considered Gustilo, a Filipina, guilty of internalized whiteness for her colorblind views, even though, as Jake Mackey and Dave Gilbert detail in Unsafe Science, scientifically speaking, Gustilo is right.
This is no one-off for Minnesota’s weird public sector. As Stanley Kurtz writes in National Review, to write Minnesota’s ethnic studies course standards, Governor Walz appointed a critical race theorist who calls for the overthrow of the U.S. government. (Consider the parallels to January 6th). Ignoring two promised deadlines, the Walz administration is delaying the release of course standards until after the election. Mainstream media are ignoring the story.
In Harris’s California, eight of ten University of California campuses required candidates for faculty jobs to issue de facto pledges supporting racial and ethnic quotas. Woke bureaucrats drove out award-winning San Jose State University Anthropology Professor Elizabeth Weiss for her allegedly bigoted research showing that Native Americans have not always occupied their homelands and that, like most humans, they practiced unsavory behaviors like enslaving others. Weiss documents this in her recent book, On the Warpath: My Battles With Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, but don’t expect your library to buy it or the media to cover it.
I agree with my Democratic friends that Mr. Trump threatens democracy. Yet supported by a Democratic Congress and media, a Harris/Walz administration would pose equivalent threats via bureaucracy. Consider the Biden administration’s new Title IX rules, which allow a single university bureaucrat to investigate and punish students and faculty for subjective offenses. This will enable unaccountable bureaucrats to sanction anyone arguing that biological sex is real. In contrast, the Biden education bureaucracy has slow-walked Jewish students’ complaints of civil rights violations, such as being harassed and even barred from public spaces on campus.
In short, both parties threaten democracy, but Republican threats like the January 6th insurrection are relatively episodic and transparent, easy for well-prepared police to subdue. Democratic threats are bureaucratic, routine, and ignored by reporters. If President Harris can pack the courts with friendly judges who view free speech as racist—remember critical race theory arose in law schools—it could mark the end of free speech in the U.S.
Given that both parties threaten democracy and freedom, America—particularly academia—may be safest with a Harris administration and a Republican congress holding hearings—say, on Tara Gustilo and Elizabeth Weiss—and passing laws to limit bureaucratic excesses. A good start would be a bipartisan commission to protect our First Amendment rights just as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and its 50 state-level committees—I serve on the Arkansas one—protect our 14th Amendment rights.
To paraphrase the—alas, largely ignored—father of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, when leaders are not angels, a divided government is our best protection against tyranny.
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First and foremost, Joe McCarthy was drunk. He was a hopeless alcoholic and it would kill him about 18 month later. And that was by the standards of the wet 1950s, when almost everyone would be considered a problem drinker by today’s standards. It doesn’t justify his tactics, but it does help explain them a little bit.
Second, we are electing a President, not a pastor. The world is not a pretty place, there are lots of nasty despots that the President must deal with, and the classic example of why we do not want a “nice” guy is Jimmy Carter. I have no doubt that Carter is an ethical and honest man, he’s spent the past four decades building houses for the poor, but he was a foreign policy disaster. It was Carter that permitted Iran to turn into the theocracy it now is, although I will give him credit for the Israel/Egypt peace treaty that I never thought would work.
Third, as to domestic politics, we should not be expected to follow the Marquess of Queensberry Rules while the Left fights free form. We *need* a President who is an obnoxious boor because that is the only type of person who will be able to stand his ground and fight.
Harris is no blushing virgin — she handed out bail money for BLM rioters and worse – imagine if Trump had done something along those lines….Something like 96% of her staff has quit, what does that tell you about her as a person?
And fourth, as to higher education — at this point, I don’t know if it can be saved.
At the very least, it is going to take someone on the national level willing to stand up to the crazies, and Trump is that type of combatant.
‘…Republican threats like the January 6th insurrection are relatively episodic and transparent, easy for well-prepared police to subdue.”
The question I ask is why weren’t the police prepared?
The Capitol Hill Police Department has 1,879 officers — Maine only has 330 State Troopers. Where were all the cops?!?!?
When you expect trouble, you cancel all days off and call in everyone to work a mandatory 18 hours on, 6 hours off until the problem is abated — I’ve seen this happen at UMass. And if it one particular day you are worried about, you don’t have to worry about the 6 hours off — you hold your night shift over for 10 hours and bring in absolutely everyone else a couple of hours before you expect the trouble to begin.
And you likely will get officers willing to waive the 6 hours off on the first day — not only is it overtime but they don’t want to leave their buddies behind. (After that, command will order them to get sleep because they will start hallucinating.)
So they could have had 1,800 cops there, instead of maybe the 100 they did (79 being injured or sick or something — it’s a guess). And until I get an explanation of why the other 1,700 weren’t there, I will not believe anything other than this was another Reichstag Fire.
There are crazy right wing nuts out there, and my guess is that a dozen *different* Federal entities, perhaps more, all decided to do a “sting” there and then — without comparing notes with each other. I absolutely believe that various Federal outfits would do this without checking to see if anyone else was doing the same thing there, it wouldn’t surprise me if various FBI field offices didn’t bother to check to see even what other FBI offices were doing.
It’s like chasing arsonists, you gotta catch them doing it, and a dozen different fire departments all arranging for their suspected arsonist to light a fire in the same state park on the same windy day. And instead of small easily-extinguished fires, you wind up with one big one that isn’t so easy to extinguish. That’s what I think happened — although I’d love to know how people knew which windows were still glass and could be broken when the majority of them had been replaced with something else that couldn’t be broken.
I wouldn’t know that — would you?
And let’s not forget that in the 1950s, Puerto Rican Nationalists actually shot five Congressmen, seriously injuring one, in the House Chamber, and that bombs actually went “bang” in the building on at least two occasions — that’s a wee bit more serious than drinking Nancy Pelosi’s beer (not that one should do that).
“Democratic threats are bureaucratic, routine, and ignored by reporters. If President Harris can pack the courts with friendly judges who view free speech as racist—remember critical race theory arose in law schools—it could mark the end of free speech in the U.S.
It wouldn’t even take that — courts can’t decide the cases never brought before them, and the people who would have brought cases challenging critical race theory and the rest aren’t being admitted to law school anymore.
You have brought so many issues together in one essay it is impossibe to respond except to say, select one issue and present your position. To mix all together in one message results in a cacophony of issues that cannot be dealt with in one discussion. Some may very overlap, but all are issues worthy of discussion. I will speak to two. First, anyone that believes that Donald Trump should be in any position of governance, that he is not a vile, vulgar fascist that is out of touch with reality of Americans, this person is not be able to have an objective discussion on issues. Republicans and Democrats are as polarized as any point in history, but my hope is that the vast majority of real Republicans would like to come to the table for a rational discussion. We have seen too many zealots attack witnesses in House Committees in a manner inappropriate for any elected representative. Consider the attack on university presidents by Rep. Fox, Stefanik, and others on the committee. One of the most shameful displays I’ve ever seen. We can do better. As scholars we should take the lead in excoriating congressional members of any party for such behavior, not defending them.
“… anyone that believes that Donald Trump should be in any position of governance, that he is not a vile, vulgar fascist that is out of touch with reality of Americans, this person is not be able to have an objective discussion on issues.”
And anyone who believes the above is ALSO not able to have an objective discussion on issues….
“attack on university presidents by Rep. Fox, Stefanik, and others on the committee. One of the most shameful displays I’ve ever seen.”
Really?!?!?
Go look at the Bork confirmation hearings — and Bork was an academic.
I thought I made clear that in my view Trump does NOT belong in power. But, unless we report things that the Trump admin got right (low inflation, secure borders, the Abraham Accords) and Biden/Harris got wrong we will have no credibility with nonelite voters and centrist/conservative students and taxpayers. And we need to admit that some of the things Democrats get wrong (inflation, higher crime, over-long lockdowns, massive self-censorship regimes creating fear) affect regular people on a day to day basis more than Trump’s (admittedly awful) sins. I know a number of professors who have lost their jobs for ideological reasons, none due to Trump. And really, Rep. Stefanik is a demagogue, but the university presidents she was grilling were even worse. One led the worst American witch hunt since Joe McCarthy.
Trump’s “low inflation” was the continuation of over a decade of low inflation (starting after the 2008 financial crisis, brought on by the failure of government to regulate financial institutions, something abetted by both parties). If Covid had not happened, there would have been no increase in inflation, which was primarily caused by supply chain disruptions brought about by changing consumption patterns (plus the war in Ukraine–the stimulus was a minor part, as other countries which did not have nearly our stimulus had higher inflation, which was a world-wide phenomenon–and don’t forget, five out of the seven trillion spent on Covid relief was authorized by Trump). Crime spiked during 2020 when Trump was in office and is now down to 2019 levels. Once again, Covid. “Over-long lockdowns” existed in Australia, which proportionally had many fewer deaths.
My main point is that while the Republicans may very well be successful in blaming the “Democrats get wrong (inflation, higher crime, over-long lockdowns, massive self-censorship regimes creating fear)”, all but the last were products of Covid. What is debatable is how the Trump administration handled Covid. Operation Warp Speed was a stunning technological achievement, but Trump can’t run on it because of the sizable anti-vaxer component of his base (Trump’s comments throughout the early stages of the pandemic were batsh*t crazy–bleach, back in the pews by Easter, etc–but they don’t seem to have slowed down governmental response–if the 2025 project is implemented and political hacks are put in charge of technocratic functions, the next response may not be so effective).
Regarding massive self-censorship, this has always been a component of academia. “American Greatness” history dominated the post WW II period, and no one could be hired who disputed that–and don’t forget the eugenics movements and its academic backers. It is just that this aspect of academia that benefited certain groups of people (white males) has now been turned against them. There needs to be a rethinking of how academia does research. My proposal would be to divide fields into “scientific” and “non-scientific”. It’s easy to tell them apart–fields where practitioners fail to bend over backwards to falsify their own hypotheses and instead apply straw man arguments rather than strong man arguments are non-scientific (this is essentially Feynman’s criteria). Thus the 1619 project would be considered non-scientific because it misstates historical fact (this is what happens when you argue for a higher truth rather than truth–the higher truth being that had the British actually tried to restrict slavery, the colonies would have revolted on that basis).
All this being said, if the Republicans had nominated Haley, they would have won easily in November. Hopefully a Trump loss (by no means guaranteed) will bring the conservative party in this country to its senses.
A Trump loss will inevitably lead to a MAGA landslide in the 2026 midterms, with Trump becoming the GOP’s version of Bill Clinton and BH Obama. Trump isn’t going to run in 2028, but what he can do is raise a bleepload of money for candidates who may challenge RINOs in the primaries and then help them in the general.
Harris had something like a 96% turnover in her VEEP staff and that’s without any real conflicts other than her personality. It will be an entertaining two years and then she will be largely neutered the way that Clinton was in ’94.