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Nov. 16, 2021 - I Don't Speak German
01:55:33
98: The University of Austin, with Kristin Rawls and Jeff Eaton
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Time Text
So thanks for coming on.
And yeah, Jack, we can get started whenever you're ready.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I just remembered that I'm the one that does the intro.
I mean, you're the you own the means of production on this, friend.
You know, you're the you're the one with the well, you know, if you were if you were as based as me, then you would know that that means that I don't do the work.
Yeah, that's that does seem to be how this works down, doesn't it?
You know?
Yeah.
I'm like, hey, Jack, you could just do this without me.
It's fine.
You're like, no, no, no.
We would love to have you know, we I just I really, you know, you're part of the family here, Daniel.
You know, we just, you know, we really just want you here just so that you can.
Yeah, no, I'm sure that's how that works.
No, we're good.
That's right.
Yeah.
My employees are my children.
I beat them if they disobey.
This is I Don't Speak German.
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
So yeah, here we are at 98. here we are at 98.
How did it come to this?
And, but it's going to be, well, I mean, we told you last time that it was going to be Christopher Rufo, didn't we?
We did.
Part one.
Yeah.
And of course it's not.
I mean, you knew it wouldn't be because it's us.
We even called it out that whenever we call out, An episode title ahead of time.
It's never the next episode.
It just isn't.
And we even lampshaded it.
And now we got most of the way through, or I got most of the way through prepping a Chris, like Chris Rofu part one, which would not even have mentioned a critical race theory.
We will do that shortly.
We will do that in a few episodes.
There is a gold mine of fucking material.
Like, just believe me on this.
Oh, I believe you.
But in that prep, I was like, you know who would be great to talk about this with?
Christian Rawls and Jeff Eaton from the Christian Write Guest.
Let me stop you there before we introduce our very welcome, wonderful guests.
What is the this that we're talking about?
Because it's not Christopher Rufo, is it?
Well, it's not.
Well, see, I thought we should join, we should bring these people on.
And in our pre-planning conversation in the DMs, suddenly this University of Austin thing happened.
Yeah.
And we just started chatting about it, and I'm like, who cares about Christopher Rufo?
This is going to be a lot more fun.
So, this just happened.
For some very idiosyncratic definitions of fun, yes.
If you were listening to this podcast, we thought you would find it fun.
So, yes, for the, you know, 10 million people who are going to listen to this, you know, we're like getting Sam Harris numbers these days.
So, Yeah, we're going to be talking about the University of Austin and not UT Austin, not the actual University of Texas in Austin, but the right-wing grift thing that no telling what this is actually going to be.
So this is very, but it's in the news that everybody's talking about it and dunking on it.
And who are we, if not derivative?
So that's what we're doing today.
Just that by itself, you know, it's already an established university called the University of Texas in Austin.
And they set up a new one and they call it the University of Austin, Texas.
With a very similar like design aesthetic as well.
Yeah.
Is this like the people who like registered domain names really close to like Target.com and like try to get e-commerce traffic just in the hopes that some people won't notice?
No, I don't think that's it.
I don't know why.
To me it all seemed very dashed off, like they just had like one conversation about it and hadn't really planned anything.
Like this was like a brainstormed thing and then Barry Weiss decided to just let everybody know.
I don't know, just the website, there's not much to it.
It's just interesting that We're going to talk about the website today, so don't worry.
We're going to get into that.
I'm just angry that now that there's an EDU, now the .org is taken, when I start my Austin-based university, I'm going to have to use like .biz or something.
It's just too crowded now.
It's like those things, mockbusters, isn't it?
You know, very, very cheap movies that try to look as much like big movies as possible, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
Transmorphers.
Yeah, yeah.
I think Transmorphers is the classic.
I want to know what they did for Dune.
Is it just worm?
Might be just worm.
That would be funny.
Sand.
Sand?
Sand is a movie.
So anyway, we're going to dig into this, we're going to have some fun with it, and maybe connect it to sort of previous educational grifts and various other types of things.
So, as Kristen implied there, this was announced on Barry Weiss's, or Barry Weiss, I think she goes by Barry Weiss.
Oh, I'm sorry.
No, the hard V, the hard W, the V sound W as always, you know, because we don't speak German here, but I was a beer geek for many years.
And so, you know, there is a, there is a terrible beer made by the now Miller owned Leinenkugel called Barry Weiss.
And I just cannot think of her without thinking of the terrible, the terrible, terrible Leinenkugel beer.
I did study German, so I just have a tendency.
You're no longer invited back.
That's the thing.
I took some Latin in high school and it's, you know, some of the same issues.
So there's a beer called Barry Weiss.
There is, yeah.
It's a German style Weiss beer with berry.
Again, there's a pre-existing brand.
Exactly!
So anyway, this was put on Barry Weiss's sub stack, but it was not actually, it was a guest post, which she does quite often when she has things that she wants to promote.
She just lets other people post on her sub stack.
And the guy who actually wrote this thing is named Pano Kanellos, who I've never heard of before.
But he's going to be the new university president or whatever.
There are at least three university presidents who are on the kind of initial list of people who are involved with this university.
And I think the gag goes, don't you only need one?
But, you know, this is the guy.
Is he the one that was the previous president of St.
John's College?
A lot of presidents to keep track of.
That is him, yes.
So you might know more about this.
Go ahead and give us some background on St.
John's and possibly cantaloupes if you have anything in your head.
St.
John's College, its main campus is located in Annapolis, Maryland, and it has another campus, but it goes according to the great books curriculums, which are kind of just a way of trying to
Reify the conservative canon and not allow other voices in.
And I know that St.
John's, it's the classical curriculum, and they only allow Western traditions to be taught in their undergraduate program.
Everybody takes the same classes they are, and it's like, I don't, if you wanted to study math, I don't know how advanced you could get, because it's like, you're reading ancient texts, and like, you're reading, you know, about Pythagoras, you're reading Pythagoras, and you're like, And they don't have, they don't have grades.
It is a university, it is, this is a model that a lot of conservative Christian schools have taken up.
Right, yeah.
But I know that St.
John's started as an all-white university.
I know, The question is, when did they allow African Americans into school, which is always... But the thing is, it's not that... I don't think it's that old.
So I think that it started as an old... It really didn't take very long, did it?
Literally, we're there already.
Also, I think it just, it needs to be said that students of St.
John's College are referred to as Johnnies.
I did not know that.
So, I also know that before the Christian colleges started, that are kind of modeled on the great books, that it was a place that a lot of, like, conservative Christians, it was one of the few places where, like, some of the homeschool people I grew up with were, like, allowed to apply to college.
They were allowed to go there.
So I looked it up, you know, apparently St.
John's, a progressive institution, allowed black people, other people, non-white people into the university in 1948, which was earlier than I anticipated.
That is earlier than I anticipated.
And again, from a just a quick Google search, they tout their high minority student body.
They have about 66% of their student body is non-white, apparently.
So, apparently there's more to look into in this question.
That's, again, that's the kind of basic Google search thing.
It is entirely possible that a whole bunch of that are like, you know, African American Southern Baptist Convention, you know, Okay, I can tell you that I applied there as an undergraduate.
I'm so glad I didn't go, but I didn't really know it was a right-wing thing.
I was like, oh, they're studying philosophy.
Everybody seems smart.
I was definitely, I mean, I definitely didn't see a single non-white person on my campus visit in 1998.
It's a different St.
John's.
Apologies.
The Google algorithm got me on that one.
You're looking at St.
John's University, which is a totally different, not at all Not really.
Wow, we're impressed by this.
Yeah, this is, this is where the, this is where the, like the Google, like the little, uh, the little window that pops up on Google that gives you like, you know, answers to questions, uh, just bit me in the ass on that one.
So, uh, yeah, we should definitely leave that in.
We should definitely leave that in for, uh, just to show what a fuck up I could be sometimes.
You know, the, the info box is the bane of us all.
Yes.
Well, I mean, this is how like, you know, one of the issues we run into over and over again on this podcast is how, you know, the algorithm is like feeding disinformation, even to people with the best intentions, you know?
And, you know, like, that's why, you know, we spend a lot of time on this podcast trying to include notes and try to, you know, make sure that people can actually look at our sources.
And we try to, even if we kind of speak, you know, we try to Hedge our bets on terms of like what we say, you know, as like fact and what we say otherwise.
And so I feel very comfortable with how that just went on because I stated something, said, this seems weird to me.
I'm not sure what's going on.
You called me out for it.
I did the second click and suddenly I was like, oh, no, clearly that was a bunch of bullshit that I just said on the show.
So, yeah.
It's literally more free inquiry and self-checking than will ever take place at ITX.
Yeah.
Yeah, so there's an article on, I'm not sure where it is, their headline or the tagline is, St.
John's wasn't white supremacist enough?
In which a person who graduated from there talks about how they were constantly trying to get non-white students to come but nobody wanted to because the curriculum was so so limited and And it, yeah, it's not, yeah.
The great books, I need to look into it more, but it is part of a conservative movement within, for classical education, within education, that doesn't do what classics departments have done all along.
It's this very limited, where they, for political reasons, they Weed out certain writers and thinkers and only include, to teach, you know, to valorize Western civilization.
And at least in my, like, past experience, like, a lot of that stuff was rationalized in the, with the sort of like, well, Abraham Lincoln taught himself to read with three books?
You know, why isn't that good enough for every student?
Like that kind of glorification of how grand it used to be when there were these handful of books everyone knew were amazing and just everyone read them and there was this shared culture.
Yeah.
Abraham Lincoln, just to name one, was not aware of the germ theory of disease.
So maybe you might need a fourth book in there somewhere, you know.
From First Principles is very time-consuming.
There have been movements within universities that also draw on this kind of model like like I went to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as an undergraduate and shortly after I graduated this right wing.
Kind of like the Koch brothers of North Carolina, a guy named Art Pope funded, helped fund a Western civilization program that uses a similar curriculum, even though, I mean, UNC is a research one university with classics and philosophy and everything.
And so I know that there have certainly been, and I know we talked about also the, you know, there are other, you know, right-wing departments of various universities, but this one draws on this, like, the same kind of, like, valorization of a certain type of classical education.
So I think that it's looking like that's what they're going to do there.
I think they're talking about using some of St.
John's curriculum at first.
That's interesting.
I have not seen that, but that would, uh, that would, that would be, you know, uh, I should say someone else told me that I, I, I have, I can't, it wouldn't surprise me.
Let's, let's, let's move past kind of, so I was going to read a bit of the Paul Canellos or Pano Canellos.
I keep wanting to call him Pano Canellos, like Barry Weiss's sub stack, but it's just the same.
Like, look again, if you're listening to this podcast, if you've been listening for any length of time, This is the same reactionary campus culture-gonna-muck garbage that you find in every single one of these things.
Conservatives are being censored, students feel afraid to speak about their right-wing beliefs, etc., etc., etc., etc.
No need to read it out loud.
Instead, let's talk about what the University of Austin, UATX, claims it's going to be.
And as Kristen mentioned earlier, this is a very bare bones website, like this, this, this, this, and it, you know, it's stylish, but it does look like something that, you know, you could probably throw up in an hour or two, if you, you know, kind of put your brain to it.
There's nothing.
There's no information.
There's nothing.
Well, there's nothing of substance.
I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to push back slightly on that.
There is a very particular piece of information that is, that is very interesting.
And we're going to get to that, but I thought let's start off and just talk about under our principles.
What is this university?
How are they advertising themselves on their own website?
Under our principles, they say, universities devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth are the cornerstone of a free and flourishing education.
For universities to serve their purpose, they must be fully committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.
In order to maintain these principles, UATX will be fiercely independent financially, intellectually, and politically.
Put a pin in that financially here, by the way.
Put a pin in that financially.
So that is not the really essential piece of information that I would, but put a pin in financially.
We're going to get back to that.
Now, first of all, these are, this is boilerplate university, like landing page horseshit, right?
You know, so if you go click around a little bit more, they have a another page.
What makes it, by the way, that is almost the entire text of the about of the landing stream of UHXEX.
Yeah, there's nothing here.
Very few pages.
If you've ever looked at a university website, I mean, you can read this in five minutes.
Oh, oh, oh, yeah, we're gonna we're gonna get to that.
Don't worry.
So.
Under what makes UATX different?
Reasonable question that you might have to ask.
Why are you different from other universities in your pursuit of knowledge and a free-flowing education?
A commitment to freedom of inquiry.
We're reclaiming a place in higher education for freedom of inquiry and civil discourse.
Our students and faculty will confront the most vexing questions of human life and civil society.
We will create a community of conversation grounded in intellectual humility that respects the dignity of each individual and cultivates a passion for truth.
That is very different from other university boilerplate.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, you know, the list of people associated with this, humility is the word that springs to mind.
Right, right.
There's also a, there's a running joke about like, like mission statements on web pages, like that ultimately all of them just, if you, if you factor them, they just reduce to all babies must eat.
It's just, how large can a truism be, is the question for most of these statements.
How much plate does this boiler need?
I'm just reminded, you know, like now I maybe just because of our company here, I'm reminded of like, when you, when you go to like church websites, you know, like kind of, you find stuff like your super reactionary right-wing church in your area.
And you go to their website and they're like about us homepages.
Like we foster community, a diverse community of people who think differently, but all just come together to worship the one true God.
And they never say like, and also we support the torture of small children and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
That's never like on the homepage.
It's always, you know, like, you know, very kind of generic statements.
At least three levels deep.
And then occasionally they'll put out a thing of like, you know, and also, you know, our founding stock was an actual segregationist in 1974.
Like that sort of thing.
You kind of run into that, you know, it might require a little bit of Googling or context where they give the game away.
But anyway, a new financial model.
We're completely rethinking how a university operates by developing a novel financial model.
So they're not a real estate trust?
We will lower tuition by avoiding costly administrative excess and overreach.
We will focus our resources intensively on academics rather than amenities.
We will align institutional incentives with student outcomes.
Okay.
You know, as Aaron Hanlon said in his piece about this at Critical Mass, Loads of this just sounds exactly like how other colleges and universities work.
How is this different from your standard neoliberal university?
Well, in your standard, like, community college actually has that same mission of like, look, we don't have the climbing wall and the giant, you know, we don't have a football team.
We don't have all that kind of stuff.
We don't have the hot tub.
We're a place where you can come and learn calculus.
We're a place where you can come and get your nursing degree.
We're a place where, you know, this is kind of like, it sounds like that, only we're here to provide a heterodox education to the scions of industry who just don't want to have to learn about how black people deserve rights, unless they're Walter E. Williams.
You know, that's the, that's kind of the lesson that you, the thing you can kind of pull away from this, basically.
It's so scammy, but I think they said they raised $10 million in six weeks, and now they're trying to raise $250 million.
250 million dollars. - Yep. - And so these are all people who are hacks, but they're really well connected and wealthy and they have, I mean, they will have ties to industry.
Oh, that is the best way to raise money.
Don't worry.
Again, we're going to get there.
I've got a list of names here.
Let's put it that way.
Okay.
So don't worry.
I'm kind of, I'm kind of slow selling this a little bit because, you know, let's let them put their best foot forward before I delve into, um, Before I delve into basic Googling of names and pulling articles from the business press.
There are no Marxist pages here.
This is all CNBC and shit.
I think there will be a lot of Substack writers coming out of this.
This is literally initially announced on a Substack.
Just call it Substack University.
Might as well be called Substack University, right?
Except it's somehow less ideologically diverse.
What is Substack but more anti-trans and less diverse?
That's sort of the answer.
Yeah.
And I don't want to, like, belabor this point because, you know, it is early.
They've only raised $10 million.
In six weeks.
I mean, you know, we raised that in an afternoon, so, you know.
It's just, it's such a bare bones website and nothing, like, having done nothing to raise that.
They've actually done plenty.
They've actually done plenty.
Again, we're going to get into this, okay?
Okay, okay, okay.
And I will say, like, the website is actually the one area where I feel like I am solidly on my turf.
Like, because advising large organizations and educational institutions on what information they should put on their websites is literally what I do.
And this is nothing but the stuff that educational institutions love to put on their websites that no one cares about.
This is lorem ipsum level website design.
Yeah.
And it's very easy to crank this stuff out because, like, oh, people want to know about class schedules.
They want to know about, like, how will I do this?
They want to know, you know, who's teaching?
What's this going to look like?
There's tons of information that's critical, but it's clear, like, they don't have it yet.
They just threw up a Squarespace website.
Yeah.
Doesn't look bad, but it's, like, it is all of the stuff that every university has As you said.
I would actually be really interested in now and like actually googling the exact phrasing of some of these and see if it might actually be literally plagiarized from somewhere.
I'd be interested in researching how soon after Barry Weiss announced the university, the website appeared.
Because I love the scenario of like, Barry just takes it into her head to announce this thing that she and her mates have been talking about.
And suddenly they sort of between themselves in their WhatsApp group or whatever, it's like, we've got to get the website up now!
Scramble!
Scramble!
To be fair, a lot of large organizations work that way today, so they may be following best practices in that sense.
There was the thing in which Netflix, if you remember back in 2011 when they announced the Quickster model where they were going to separate the DVD by mail and the streaming service thing, they didn't actually register the Quickster Twitter a candle at that time.
So, you know, there's a long history of, you know, blunder-headed moves by dipshits who make these kinds of decisions.
But moving, well, we should read the innovative, you want to know about the innovative curriculum, right?
I mean, surely the audience at least wants to know about this.
What am I going to learn at the University of Austin?
Our curriculum is being designed, is being designed, first of all, okay.
In partnership, not only with the world's great thinkers, but also with its great doers.
Visionaries who have founded bold ventures, artists and writers of the highest order, pioneers in tech, and the leading lights in engineering and the natural sciences.
Students will apply their foundational skills to practical problems in fields such as entrepreneurship, public policy, education, and engineering.
There's a lot of coded language there, right?
There's a lot.
That's actually a really fascinating paragraph because the whole, like, not just thinkers, but doers feels like that, that feels like code language for, there's a lot of people that don't actually have any background in education and are going to be terrible teachers, but they're ideologically on board with us and we're going to give them some lessons.
Yeah.
What kinds of programs are they planning for in this nascent University of Austin?
I mean, how are they going to train engineers with their great books curriculum?
Somebody's got to learn.
Well, spoiler alert, we're going to get there.
We keep highlighting this, but there's a whole lot of venture capital, buddy.
This is this.
Yeah.
Who's funny?
Silicon Valley.
It's a little in Silicon Valley.
And none of them went to college.
They're dropped out of college.
So they don't.
It's not.
It doesn't appear to be Peter Thiel.
It's Peter Thiel's pal.
His best buddy.
It's not Peter Thiel.
It's a completely different guy.
It's a completely different guy.
No connection whatsoever.
I'm coming to that.
I'm coming to that.
We're going to go through this.
What's the first thing they're going to teach?
A Summer Seminar.
The most important thing you can ever learn in a university is your Summer Seminar.
The title of the Summer Seminar that they're going to start in 2022, apparently, is The Forbidden Courses.
Our Forbidden Courses Summer Program invites top students from other universities to join us for a spirited discussion about the most provocative questions that often lead to censorship or self-censorship in many universities.
Students will become proficient and comfortable with productive disagreement.
That may mean a Charles Murray.
We're going to break out the calipers.
That's what all this means.
Instructors will range from top professors to accomplished business leaders, journalists, and artists.
So Dave Chappelle, Charles Murray, as you say, J.K.
Rowling.
J.K.
Rowling, you know, actually J.K.
Rowling is probably a liberal guy by these kind of standards, you know, like, honestly, like, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe Papa John.
Yeah, now that he was cut from the company, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Accomplished business leader.
Now Glenn will be there.
He doesn't have the gravitas.
That's, that's kind of the only problem with Glenner.
Like they agree with his ideological commitments to gender critical feminism, of course, but you know, not, not to not to his desire to write comedy.
Apparently that's going to be the thing.
Although that's ironic.
Beginning in Fall 2022, Entrepreneurship and Leadership MA Program.
The primary purpose of most conventional business programs is to credential large cohorts of passive learners with a lowest common denominator curriculum comprised of the most abstract principles of accounting, finance, management, and organizational leadership.
Also, I kind of mostly agree with that.
Business schools are mostly bullshit.
Oh, business!
Oh, did they say business?
Oh, I guess.
This is a business program.
It's a conventional business program.
It's credentialed large cohorts of passive learners.
It's basically like you were the captain of your football team and now you want to go and work an office job where you don't have to do a lot.
Get a business degree.
That's your step forward.
This jumped out at me when I looked at the website.
The entrepreneurship thing was a big emphasis.
Firstly, I think that there's two possible reasons they might be emphasizing this.
Firstly, I think.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe that business studies is the biggest subject in American further education and higher education.
Universities in the U.S.
produce more business degrees than any other single degree.
It shouldn't even be a college degree in my opinion.
It's a vocational anyway.
I actually don't even think it's a vocational degree.
You're right, you're right.
Getting a two years associates program in like HVAC or being a plumber is much more respectable than a business degree.
Sure, yeah, yeah.
But you want to be advertising that you're doing business studies, essentially, because that's the biggest market.
Yeah.
And that is an interesting issue in itself, because it gives the lie, one of the many things that gives the lie to the idea that this is kind of all based upon, that the American university is this hotbed of radical leftism, because they're not being taught radical left ideas in their business study degree courses, okay?
And the other thing, you know, Obviously, I don't know, but the emphasis on disavowing the normal style of American university business study degrees interests me because it sounds like they're kind of implying, well, we're going to be doing more than just teaching you accounting, which makes me suspect that what they're going to be doing is something like teaching radical right-wing libertarian economics.
Oh, Jack, that's that's a silly conclusion for you to draw.
Oh, is there another bullet point I need to read that's right into the one I just read?
Sorry, I don't want to interrupt you, but like, you know, I feel like, you know, you've probably got this.
So you go ahead.
In this 12-month program, the Entrepreneurship and Leadership Master's program-- in a 12-month master's program, first of all-- OK, anyway.
In this 12-month program, UATX will recruit elite students from top schools, teach them the classical principles of leadership and market foundations, and then embed them into a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and public and then embed them into a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture Students will then actively apply their learning to the most urgent and seemingly intractable problems facing our society, both in the private and public sectors.
So this is an intern factory for people who are already at elite universities, who are like fucking anti-woke fucking bullshit.
Stanford University is too far left for me.
My master's program in business administration, let me go work for a Silicon Valley startup and like learn the rules of the world from, you know, Dick Bro, 23 year old, 1947, who, you know, is going to try to make, uh, You try to reinvent the bus for the 85th time, but this time with more capital.
Hey, Digbro97 owns at least 15.
I'm interested in the classical principles thing.
Are they going to be reading like Adam Smith?
And like, what, what are they?
I suspect Adam Smith probably be too left wing for this course.
You don't read Adam Smith, you read excerpts from Adam Smith from Peter Thiel's book.
Finally, there's going to be somewhere for American business and economics students to go where they're not just being force-fed Marx all the time.
If there's one thing I immediately think of when I hear, oh, I got my MBA from Stanford, it's, whoa, there's a Marxist.
All right, comrade.
In all seriousness though, this sort of outline of how to progress is so bizarrely out of sync with what you would think of even a real principled assault on the leftist nature of higher education would look like.
I mean, it's just, I mean, there's so little on these bones that it's kind of hard to make any kind of pronouncement.
No, it's, it's really like, I think we'll, I think what I want to do is kind of get through kind of a, like the, the outline I have, and then maybe we can talk about what we think this is going to be.
Just because there's a lot of, I said, there's like one really interesting piece of information on the website and it's in the frequently asked questions page, which is really the only page you need to read.
It's the only thing that has any kind of background context.
I will say that is groundbreaking, because this would be the first university whose Frequently Asked Questions page contains some of the most valuable information.
Well, this is because there is no information anywhere else on the webpage, but you know, the one thing... I'm assuming that the valuable information you're referring to is the, you know, the justification for their decision to base in Austin?
Yeah, if you have that in front of you, that's the funniest bit of information.
Joe Rogan!
It's good enough for Elon Musk, it's Joe Rogan!
What I thought was the most interesting bit was the question, Do you have a physical location?
Not a question you generally have to ask at a university.
Usually you either know you're signing up for an online-only university, or you know there's a place.
Frequently asked questions at this university.
Are you purely conceptual?
Is there a place that you exist in the real world, or are you just a bunch of bullshit?
And they say, yes, our headquarters is located in Central Austin, 2112 Rio Grande Street, Austin, Texas 78705.
Guess what you find when you Google that address?
Would you like to?
I'm on maps looking right now.
It's a law office.
It's a little law office.
Yeah.
Oh, because the next line says we're in the process of trying to find a place for the actual canvas.
This is where our nails are.
This is Rash Chapman, Attorneys at Law.
If you look into their website, which I've included in the show notes, you find that they do a lot of oil industry litigation.
And technology and various... I guarantee you that the big money man who's behind this has used them for some of his legal work.
There's some connection here.
I wasn't able to find it from a couple of hours of kind of looking around on this.
I guarantee you if you look into legal filings by Rash Chapman, you're going to find some really interesting names on this.
That is a project I will commit myself to for a little while to try to kind of dig that up for future episodes.
Because there are probably people, you know, who work for this firm at COP26 recently there to lobby for, you know, doing nothing, essentially.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Or, you know, like working in the kind of public policy about like, how do you solve the homeless crisis?
And the answer is, well, just give Silicon Valley a lot of money to build new and special housing for the poor.
And, you know, obviously cut funding for any public housing, public sector housing, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, that sort of thing.
Public housing has been on my mind lately for a number of reasons.
Partly because I was working on a Christopher Rufo episode, and that's a spoiler alert for a future bit.
Because, yeah, he was... Christopher Rufo, his first kind of public policy bullshit was kicking on homeless people.
So, you know, that's the spoiler there.
Wow.
So, yeah.
I was expecting to... A long and venerable tradition on his side of the aisle, yeah.
Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.
Anyway, we will get into that in a future episode.
I found an article about the University of Austin, and this is not the secret information, but when I say Peter Thiel's buddy, this is who Peter Thiel's buddy is.
A piece from the Texas Tribune published a couple of days ago.
They also haven't officially received non-profit status from the federal government.
They are using Cicero Research, which is run by Austin-based tech investor and advisory board member Joe Lonsdale as a temporary non-profit sponsor.
According to the 2020 tax filing for Cicero Research, its mission is to, quote, create and distribute non-partisan documents recommending free market-based solutions to public policy issues, unquote.
And, quote, produce and distribute nonpartisan educational materials about the importance of preserving Texan policies, values, and history.
Joe Lonsdale, Peter Thiel's buddy, who was recently in the news.
He had a had a viral tweet, if you remember this from a few days ago.
He tweeted under a comment about Pete Buttigieg's paternity leave, six month paternity leave.
Right.
Wow.
Great for fathers to spend time with their kids and support moms.
But any man in an important position who takes six months of leave for a newborn is a loser.
What a lovely guy.
old days men had babies and worked harder to provide for their future that's the correct masculine response what a lovely guy what a lovely lovely guy to be to be fair that's a solid advertisement for their target demographic if you google his name that's a little like the first thing that comes up too so this is you know he literally like he knows he's launching this quote-unquote university and he's on twitter showing his ass that way this is the person funding.
This is the person funding.
I was just about to say, scratch a libertarian, get an MRA, but you don't even have to scratch them.
No, no, you really don't.
And of course, we should note that this kind of level of basic misogyny is just endemic on the super far right spaces that we spend most of our time covering.
Like, this would be, you know, par for the course.
In fact, I mean, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, the actual Nazis who work for a living actually tend to be a little bit better on this kind of stuff.
Like, they'll still say, well, you're a cuck for taking six months off, but they will, like, actually support, like, yeah, no, you should get to spend time with your kids because you want to, like, raise your white children right, et cetera, et cetera.
So, you know, like, you know, like, they're actually more woke.
That is an interesting undercurrent there, because 90% of my time is in the digital and tech industry, and that kind of vibe, that kind of posturing is so, so common, especially in startup and venture capital-backed You know, business culture, that idea of like, oh, yeah, you know, you flex by doing 14 hour days.
And then the payoff is you get to retire when you're, you know, 28 with, you know, eight million dollars.
If you also go back in time to, you know, like the mid 80s and do that instead of doing it now.
But like that vibe is so common.
And in like, In adjacent circles that I see, like that comment that he posted was, it's almost like an extension of like hustle culture, but like more for people who want to like own an island.
I love, I love all these CEOs who they talk about, you know, like, what's your average day like?
And it's like, well, I work, you know, 18 hours a day.
And the way that they work 18 hours a day is they define everything they do for their entire life as work.
It's like my two-hour exercise, it's starting at 6 a.m.
Well, that's work because I have to be fit and proper in order to go into the business world hard.
The four-hour dinner that I have, that's meeting with investors.
That's clearly me working.
It's always like that sort of thing.
One of the things that you run into, and I was looking at the list of people who are on this University of Austin webpage, and I'm like, Have any of these people ever actually worked a shift at Walmart or similar?
And maybe for like three months when they were 17, they had a job like that.
But almost universally, it's like, I worked for my dad's law office.
I filed some papers as a summer job.
I worked on computers and repaired them for a while.
And then I graduated and went right into a summer internship.
I went right into a university program.
I had to have a part-time gig also kind of working for my uncle's firm or whatever.
It's always like that kind of background.
None of these people ever had to wear shoes with a steel tip in them.
It's just not a thing.
Never, never.
It may be too early, but the shape of this and the persistence with which entrepreneurship and engineering is mentioned in every single comment On their site, which feels just weird because their ideological thing is all about free inquiry and escaping the confines of an ideological straitjacket that the rest of the world is in.
But then the concrete stuff is like, oh no, yeah, we're going to get you a bunch of libertarian interns.
That's like the actual, that's the actual product.
That's exactly what it is.
It's advertising to these like tech companies for, you know, like, we're going to find the people who are uncomfortable in their existing place.
We're going to train them up for you.
We're going to get them to drop out and there'll be cheap labor for you when you, you know, that's, that's, that's the like, In states like that's the highest place this ends up like this is never going to be like you're never going to go and get an English degree from the University of Austin.
It's always going to be like this kind of bullshit.
No, it's certainly the impression I get.
It's like the anti-woke grift is being employed as a kind of PR strategy to sell this thing which is fundamentally just another one of these institutes or think tanks backed by a right-wing billionaire that's all over, you know, the academy in economics departments devoted to spreading far-right economic libertarian dogma, you know.
We talked a little bit about this in private messages, you know, but George Mason University is just infested with Koch brothers money in all these libertarian and Austrian school think tanks that just devote themselves to propaganda and lobbying and but George Mason University is just infested with Koch brothers money in all these libertarian and Austrian school think It just seems like that is what they're aiming for.
As you say, it probably won't even get there.
But the PR strategy is just the, you know, their adaptation of the anti-woke, anti-CRT thing.
Yeah.
Right.
And hey, startup founder, are you worried that your next employee might actually know about labor law or know what the word diversity means?
Don't worry.
We're going to make sure you never have to have an employee who knows what the word union means.
We're not even going to catch that in our math classes.
The word will literally never come up.
Yeah, the way that's coded, you know, it's written in code as, you know, oh, don't worry, people that come from us won't be complaining about microaggressions or anything like that.
Right.
They're certainly not going to try to bargain collectively against you.
Yeah, no, it's it's pretty obvious there.
Right.
So more about this guy, Lonsdale.
He had a bad tweet.
Hey, all of us have had a bad tweet.
I'm sure he's a perfectly reasonable, nice guy.
Right.
OK.
This is from a CNBC, again, the far left Marxist CNBC.
Why Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale is leaving Silicon Valley?
This is from late last year.
Lonsdale said that 10 to 15 of his firm's 45 employees are likely to join him in the Austin area.
He is also moving his policy organization, Cicero Institute, to the city.
Oh, by the way, the 10 to 15 of the firm's 45 employees, Lonsdale was literally working for Palantir.
He was the CEO of Palantir at that time.
He was moving Palantir to Denver, and then he's moving the Cicero Institute to Austin, and he's moving to Austin, and he left Palantir.
It's a complicated history of he was moving, but then he left, and so he's no longer with Palantir.
He is now doing his own thing.
His big thing now is this venture capital firm called 8VC.
Following along on this article among HVC's better known investments to date are Palmer Lucky startup and a real I'm going to stop here and we're going to go through these Palmer Lucky startup and a real sorry, which is building a virtual border wall.
Let's jump forward here and talk about.
Sorry, hang on what I thought you might have a question about this.
So I found it.
So let's jump ahead slightly into later in the notes and go.
An article from The Verge.
Palmer Lucky surveillance startup and a real science contract for virtual border wall.
What is this thing, right?
U.S.
Customs and Border Protection has signed a deal with Anduril, the virtual border wall startup launched by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey.
Yeah, Palmer Luckey was originally a part of Oculus working on virtual reality stuff and then left in like 2017 after Trump came into office and starts this Anduril project.
So this article is from a couple of years ago.
The Washington Post reports that the agency awarded Andrew a five-year contract to deploy portable surveillance towers meant to detect moving vehicles and human figures across the U.S.
border.
The deal will see CBT purchase 140 towers in 2021 and 2022, supplementing 60 towers that were already part of a pilot program.
The company executive told the Post that the deal was worth several hundred million dollars.
Adderall has been working with CBP since 2018 and has secured additional contracts with groups like the U.S.
Marine Corps and the U.K.
Royal Navy.
Good for you, Jack.
Good for your country as well.
You also get the benefits of this.
Its sentry towers use a variety of sensors, including LiDAR, to capture data.
An AI system called Lattice then analyzes it to distinguish between different kinds of moving objects.
The goal is to detect humans crossing the U.S.
border while minimizing the number of false alarms from animals.
Andrule has also produced other technology like a battering ram drone that is not part of the CBP contract.
In other words, we put a whole bunch of high tech shit on the border to kill brown people.
Yeah, and hundreds of millions of dollars for a racist CCTV system.
But it's also named after Aragorn's sword.
Yeah, anytime you see anything that looks like it's any tech startup that was named after the Lord of the Rings, you know there's some bullshit there.
They are literally all like this, you know.
I always think of Michael Moorcock's comment about the elves in Lord of the Rings.
You know, I never liked them because I always thought they were eyeing up Poland.
So, yeah.
So, yeah, he's and like at best, this is sort of like the Star Wars initiative of the 80s, where they put a bunch of like government money into these private tech firms, these like defense industry firms that make something.
instead of it being about nuclear weapons it's to stop brown right right like the best version of this is that it just it's just hundreds of millions of dollars of government waste into something that doesn't work and the worst version is like literal like privatized you know drone warfare on the southern u.s border against desperately impoverished people trying to escape Exactly.
And so instead of building an actual border wall where we actually have to deal with, you know, individual property owners and we have to deal with like political ramifications and people don't, you know, it's like this big ugly thing that we have to build and like people can like protest against it.
No, we're just going to send out drones and LIDAR and we're going to put a bunch of sentry posts and nobody notices when you do that.
Well, at least it's not like the big ring of red laser beams that I was envisaging.
I suppose it's a bit better than that, you know?
Going back to that original CNBC article, the other people who are involved in this, Dustin Moskowitz's software company Asana, so H8VC, which is Lonsdale's venture capital firm, also funds this thing, Asana.
Now, Moskowitz on the scale of like Billionaire tech industry guys.
If you know his name, you probably know him as the founder of Facebook who really wasn't in the social network.
He's the guy who's in a couple of scenes who never really has any lines or anything.
He was an early investor in Facebook.
He was in the dorm room at the time.
He left in 2008 to go do his own thing.
He's been involved in very liberal Democratic Party stuff.
Doesn't have the nightmarish background as far as I can see that a lot of these other guys do.
But is deeply invested in, you know, YIMBYism in terms of like, we just need to have private investors build better homes in San Francisco, as opposed to like funding public policy.
And he is deeply involved in what's called effective altruism, which we discussed in a previous episode with the Slate Star Codex thing, which is basically like, You know, I'm a venture capitalist and I make billions of dollars every year.
And like, I want to just make sure that my that you should give me more money so that I can use my philanthropy wisely towards like the most effective versus that, which almost always mean I'm going to like insert my my will on U.S.
politics as opposed to like actually listening to what people on the ground believe they need.
So, you know.
I am rich and intelligent and have a billions of dollars in the tech industry startup.
And so therefore I know better social policy than anything and anybody else.
Right.
That's what that always means.
And if you go back into that, you know, kind of the, the earlier thing I was doing on the website where the, like, you know, public policy experts and then, you know, like, like it's, it's, these are the kinds of people you're going to start circling.
on that.
It's always going to be someone who's like, well, clearly we just need to let Silicon Valley know us the way.
We just need to make sure to use their expertise to inform public policy.
And so never, ever listen to what actual people on the ground or actual leftists have to say about anything.
This is far left in terms of Sam Harris's people that he will bring on as sort of the lefties who are going to argue with him on various things.
They're always like this kind of person.
You know, these are the far left within this tech solutionists with vaguely progressive ideas.
We're going to fix climate change by investing in, you know, various, you know, high tech solutions because that's going to be the way we get out of it as opposed to like build a fucking train.
Let's not invest in public infrastructure that will actually make it easier to not use as much carbon.
Let's try to invest in some carbon capture scheme and give billions of dollars, billions of public dollars at that to these private firms.
And that's kind of the other dirty secret here.
I want to let you talk here, but that's the other dirty secret here is that all of these guys make their money not by actually building something that people want to use, but by Absorbing U.S.
overwhelmingly U.S.
tax dollars into, you know, kind of venture capital firms and privatizing what was already public infrastructure.
Sorry, Jack, go ahead.
Yeah, no, I was just going to say the, you know, the altruism and the progressivism always just purely coincidentally seems to end up with, you know, deregulation, privatization, subsidies and low taxes for corporations.
It's funny how that works.
Motivated reasoning is a hell of a thing.
Yeah.
8VC, Lonsdale's thing.
This is the end of that.
This is the end of that little paragraph there.
He's also putting a lot of money in healthcare companies like insurance provider, Oscar Health and the men's health company, HIMSS.
Have either, has any of you heard of Oscar Health or HIMSS by chance?
No.
These are, these are telemedicine companies, the telemedicine companies.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Yeah.
And, and HIMSS is a little like, for the man in your life who needs telehealth, you're too manly to actually go to the doctor.
Give us, you know, $50.
Tactical telehealth.
Have you got man flu?
Fish your phone out of the pocket on your cargo pants and use our app.
So what's the term?
It's a telehealth for a man who has a daily personal carry. - Yeah. - Oh my God. - All right. - Well, it's amazing how dense with background information that small clip was.
Yeah, it's amazing how, I mean, really the thing is, and this is something that I, like, have been wanting to do for a while, is to, like, start reading, like, the business papers and start reading, like, actually get, like, I looked into getting, like, a Financial Times subscription.
Guess how much a Financial Times subscription is?
Like, there's, like, a $1 for the first four weeks, okay?
And then after that, if you need to subscribe longer than that.
Are we talking like the Economist level or like Wall Street Journal level?
It's actually $68 a month is how much it costs to subscribe to the Financial Times.
Is it a daily publication?
Yeah, I believe it's a daily publication.
I mean, it's a constantly updated website.
But I mean, people who get their news, From financial reporters, people who need that level of reporting.
This is because it doesn't matter.
It just becomes a thing.
And they offer institutional discounts and stuff.
And it's like, this is the kind of stuff that we need to be reading if we want to really understand what's going on.
Chomsky always said that.
Chomsky always said that he read the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal and The Economist and stuff like that, because that's where you're more likely to get the unvarnished truth.
Because when they're talking to each other about how to make financial investments, they actually have to tell the real truth.
And again, it is a version of what they talk about when they don't think we're listening.
So I really hope that I could do some more of this in 2022.
It's a huge time suck of its own.
But like paying attention to the business news, there is one of the things that I, sorry, this is just me kind of talking now, but one of the things that I've realized that this podcast has been doing all along that I'm only kind of realizing now is that we're really talking about this kind of confluence of like the tech industry and like this kind of far right culture war industry.
And we've had Corey Pine on the show, kind of way back when, and who actually wrote a great book, Live, Work, Work, Work, Die.
Live, Work, Work, Work, Die.
Three works.
Great book where he actually went and like tried to become like a tech industry entrepreneur for a couple of years.
And his kind of like travails doing it.
It's an amazing book.
It's an amazing book.
So go check it out.
Anyway, So what's been the response to this, other than people balking out on Twitter?
From the Texan, a newly announced free speech focused university draws over 3,000 employment increase in four days.
Now, people are making a big deal out of this.
I am going to say that given the state of the academic job market in 2021, that seems kind of a low ball, honestly.
When, like, a single, like, post for, you know, an 18th century Victorian literature professor in Fargo, North Dakota gets, like, 200 applicants.
You know, like, this does not strike me as, like, you know, this huge groundswell of people who are desperate to be rid of, like, the grip of the far-left institution.
This feels more like, you know, yeah, nobody has a fucking job, you know?
Yeah.
So it's not like academics, you know, with secure jobs saying, oh great, I can apply to do the same job, but somewhere where I won't be subject to smothering authoritarian socialist orthodoxy.
Instead, it's people who haven't got jobs thinking, I might be able to eat.
Well, they're arguing, and so this is like a PR statement that was given to the Texan for this article, and it says, Hawke, a native Texan philanthropist, let me, it's a philanthropist again, let's put a circle around that, with degrees from MIT and the University of Texas, is one of more than 30 members of the DeVars Board of Founding Trustees and Advisors.
The advisors include Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers, who I got in trouble for, you know, saying that women just probably couldn't be scientists because they're lady brains.
Brown University economist Glenn Lowry, very famously the kind of guy who's like, you know, well, if you look at like the actual circumstances of how black people get shot, this clearly isn't a problem of racist police.
You know, he's that guy.
Former ACLU president Nadine Strossen, who I don't know a whole lot about, and Pulitzer Prize winning author David Mamet.
Oh, God.
Who I used to have a lot of respect, like I used to.
He's been a lot of great movies, but like, man, what a right wing shithead.
Has he always been a right wing shithead?
He kind of he kind of are.
He kind of always has.
You know, like he he was always kind of this guy, but he kind of hit it a little bit better in the end.
But like he really he literally wrote a stage play turned into a film, which was about how Difficult it is to understand how you really can't know whether a female academic was actually sexually harassed by a professor or not, and I don't have that title on the tip of my tongue.
Oleana!
Oleana, that's the one.
I keep getting confused with Siriana in my head, and I know that Siriana is the George Clooney oil movie, but I couldn't remember the other one.
So, yeah.
Yeah, so since founding trustees journalist Barry Weiss and former St.
John's College President Pano Kanellos announced plans for the university on Monday, Hawk says UATX has received more than 3,000 inquiries from potential faculty.
And here we get to that point.
These are not just recent PhD graduates, but tenured professors, chaired professors from many different universities, said Haque.
The outpouring of inquiry to be involved professionally and to be a part of this project has been overwhelming.
Well, hang on a minute.
I thought all the professors in American universities were leftists.
They all have to pretend to be leftist, right?
They all have to be hemmed in by this.
The question that isn't asked in that article that really would be the next question is like, well, can we get a breakdown on that?
Like how many, you know, who are you getting inquiries from?
If you've got like big name people, I mean, you don't have to name them, but like, let's get into some details on this.
Like who are you getting inquiries from?
You know, I'm guessing, I'm guessing, you know, I don't doubt that like, you know, billionaire VC puts out a, you know, we're going to have a university and we're going to need people to put their names on it.
You're going to get, you know, people are going to want to sign up for that.
Like, you know, yeah, I'll get on the VC grift, sure.
You know, it's just like, like the number is not like necessarily indicative of any kind of like real stampede quality or anything like that.
You know, 3000 is not a number that like strikes me as like, you know, some like insane.
Yeah, no.
I wonder how that tracks to like the number of people who apply for like grants.
Right, yeah, no, that would be another question as well.
So, I do have some other pieces, which we kind of touched on a little bit earlier here.
You know, there's a great piece in The New Republic, which I've linked to, which is by a guy who teaches in the humanities, and, you know, just kind of asking questions like, well, what is this heterodox university thing supposed to mean, right?
Like, you know, what do you, like, we actually don't spend a lot of time in, like, university classwork.
doing, like asking basic questions and asking hard questions and, you know, getting classroom responses is not like a part of a university, you know, education.
And, you know, he says, it's true that in most college classes, you won't find an emphasis on lively debate or over divisive issues because it's largely not what class time is for.
The UATX founders say they'll hear every opinion and every opinion must be supported by evidence, but not all opinions have evidentiary support.
No.
Knowledge comes first in the classroom.
Staking out an opinion in search of evidence has the process exactly backwards.
Professors spend most of our time teaching and leading discussions over technical matters, building knowledge from particulars.
It's easy to see this in the natural sciences, computer science, and mathematics, not because these fields entertain no value questions or moral controversies, but because you'll have 75 minutes on a Tuesday to introduce shell commands in Python, Or the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
But social science and the humanities course material is also technical.
Forget arguing over deeper meaning, just try scanning Alexander Pope's essay on Criticism, covering the history of the heroic couplet, and explaining Pope's classical references in 75 minutes, just to help students looking at this kind of writing for the first time develop a solid paraphrase of what's going on.
And I'd say normal class for me.
Class discussions can be lively and contentious, but perceived from technical instruction, not political commitments, which is obvious.
Yes, yes, yes.
Yeah, that was that was that was a really good piece.
And then I've got a couple of a couple of pieces that kind of go into the history of like the Koch brothers funding various firms and, you know, various funding chairs on U.S.
universities.
I'm not going to read any of that.
I feel like we've kind of made that point already.
So now that we've discussed, now that you've listened to me babble on about a website for an hour, what do we think?
What do we think?
I mean, I'll just say what I find most interesting is like that comment about most universities don't spend a lot of time on that because most class time is spent just like giving people all of the foundational building blocks they will need just to be able to engage with the conversations of the field they are trying to study.
Not to harken back to the Rufo topic, but like... We can talk about Rufo, that's fine.
It feels very similar to like the kind of alarm and anger you see from a lot of people in right-wing or like
Let's say credulous listeners to the right wing, who get very alarmed at the idea of like children being taught communism or children being taught critical race theory and like, you know, the, you know, like, I think Nebraska, or either Nebraska or North Dakota actually just introduced legislation, you know, outlawing teaching of critical race theory.
And it's the first one of those bills that actually provides a reasonable definition, an accurate definition of like, you know, a legislation, a level of detail appropriate for legislation, we'll say, and it's actually accurate.
And then it declares that it's illegal to teach that.
And like, at that point, Explaining the law in a university context becomes illegal, which is deeply ironic and meta, but like this confusion of the difference between telling students what they must believe and spelling out an ideology versus explaining an ideology so that students can actually engage with it and understand what it is.
Like, these are the moving pieces of this school of thought.
Understanding them is an exercise in engaging with it, honestly.
You don't have to like it, but, like, you gotta know what it is.
And there seems to be this deep, like, deep river of misunderstanding that that level of engagement with the concept is indoctrination in and of itself.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Because it is when it comes from their side.
Exactly!
To these people it's a scandal that certain ideas should even be acknowledged as existing.
I mean they want to pretend that Ayn Rand is a philosopher so that they can indoctrinate people, right?
So it is and they think that there's just a lot of projection about what what other people are engaged in, I think.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
I mean, if you go and like sit in on a business class at some point, you know, just, just show up and like hide in the back of the classroom and, you know, listen to what they're talking about.
The, the foundations of American capitalism and kind of world capitalism are just unquestioned.
There's just no, there's no pushback to that whatsoever.
Go into an economics class.
Now this, this may be changing slightly in, in, in the last few years, but you don't have to get into economics like many years ago.
And, you know, they just, they teach you, okay, here's what the, here's what the supply demand curve looks like.
You go through the whole thing and there's never a foundational step in which we say, these are the assumptions that we take forward in these things.
It's just built into the very basis of the thing.
When you survey economics professors, 70% of them or so tend to be self-described libertarians because it makes the math easier.
There's that old Twitter joke of like, you know, point to the point where two lines intersect on a graph.
And this is why poor people should die.
You know, like, that's the you know, and I mean, like, there, it does get more sophisticated higher levels.
I mean, I know people who are, you know, who have like, Degrees in economics who are good socialists and anarchists, etc.
You can unlearn that, but it is absolutely a part of the basic indoctrination.
And this doesn't come about because the material of the field naturally leads one to that conclusion.
If you interview a biologist, 95% of them or higher believe in the theory of evolution.
Because the basic concepts of becoming a biologist lead you to that.
This is because there are giant organizations putting their thumb on the scales and making these programs behave in certain ideologically fixed ways, right?
And to pretend that a handful of Black, lesbian, trans, Marxist professors Teaching people, like, basic facts of history, you know?
Like, you know, African Americans have been oppressed, etc.
Like, and to think that, like, that overwhelms this entire, you know, other ideological process is just fooling yourself.
It's ridiculous.
And I mean, there's this whole history of Marxists being blacklisted from fields where they might have had more of a hearing, like philosophy in the United States.
So yeah, so there's very little study now of Marxism in the field because of McCarthyism.
But this is all part of a political project, isn't it?
And the political project is to link something which, you know, in the minds of a huge number of people is just sort of inherently bad or weird or scary.
You know, Marxism, which is this big scare word.
And of course, it has loads of anti-Semitic connotations, you know, is to link that with any kind of pedagogical discussion of, you know, the realities of American history and, you know, the world history more generally.
Which, you know, in any honest assessment has to involve talking about, you know, structural white supremacy and structural patriarchy and stuff like that.
So it's a very conscious project of linking You know, any teaching about this, this is what the CRT panic, the very deliberately confected CRT panic is all about.
It's about linking any teaching about these things to this big scary word, Marxism, which has all these connotations, you know, gulags, et cetera, et cetera.
Which those connotations were put there specifically in the service of, sorry, you were getting there, but the connotations themselves were put there originally as a form of ideological warfare Running from the Cold War, at least here in the United States.
The reason that the only reason for that guy to link content of this on Twitter that, you know... Yeah, the Washington Post article.
So that we don't have to deal with the way that these things emerged out of the Frankfurt School and were influenced by the Frankfurt School.
So that we don't look like anti-Semites when we talk about how much we hate critical theory.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
I hadn't thought of that, but I really agree.
Yeah, you're right.
My God.
Yeah.
With the greatest respect to everybody, I think sort of going into the reality of who and what the Frankfurt School was and were is kind of just beside the point.
I mean, it's fascinating in itself, but when these people talk about the Frankfurt School or critical theory or whatever, they're not talking about the reality.
They're just using them as a signifier, you know, because they're handy, because they're foreign and they're Marxists.
Dun-dun-dun!
Right, and they don't really know what that means, right?
And they have all these scary, critical ideas about America that, you know, they know their audience won't like.
That's what it's about.
And it's like with, what I was saying before, the project is to just link these things that they know their audience won't like and will find scary because, as you mentioned, Daniel, you know, the project to demonize...
You know, and it goes right the way back to before the Cold War.
It goes back to Wilson and the administration very deliberately launching, you know, a red scare, etc.
But, you know, this is entrenched.
So they're linking the stuff they want to stop, any sort of expansion of knowledge and understanding through education about things like structural white supremacy and patriarchy, etc.
They want to stop it getting taught.
And their method is to link it in the public mind with these scary foreign Jewish Marxist people.
critical ideas.
That's all they're doing.
Because they're a bunch of reactionary conservatives, many of them just outright Republicans.
And they know it's in their economic self-interest to damage these things because these things are a challenge to them.
That's what I think.
And bringing it full circle back to our favorite virtual university.
I'm going to read out a list of people who are on this university at the end.
So yes, bring it back.
Bring it back.
Most probable case, no one's really thinking too far ahead, and this is basically a VC grift.
Like, you know, nine, like, you know, seven out of ten, like, When PragerU started, they also said, we're going to have a university campus, grant degrees, and now they're like an incredibly effective propaganda mill for right-wing ideas just entirely online.
That's an entirely possible future for this.
I predict a formal partnership at some point down the line.
Sorry, go on, go on.
Like the worst case scenario, I mean, like, you know, short of like, Somehow this results in Larry Summers triggering a full nuclear exchange or something like that, you know, short of something like that.
Like, the worst case scenario is this effort or something close enough to it, something like it,
becoming more and more normed as like the the the on-ramp for like homeschoolers or ideologically activated like high school student type you know type kids to
Get what they understand to be the right kind of education and take the next step and get enough qualification that they could like, you know, transition to their internship at some weird, like, you know, VR startup or, you know, get a, you know, get a job as a congressional page or something, you know, well, something like that.
You know, they could make a transition to something that they feel is a future.
Also the origin story for Christopher Rufo, but that will be a future episode.
But then, this is another way to do that, that also ensures they never actually have to engage with any of that uncomfortable stuff that a real university actually entails.
Yeah.
Right.
They don't have to actually like worry about financial aid programs or you know like even on their even on their like in some of their promotional things they're like we're going to rely on scholarships through grants for our students.
Even from like A conceptual standpoint, like, oh, you can go here and there's a pathway to, you know, becoming a fully functioning member of society that doesn't mean compromising your ideological principles by hearing someone explain Marxism.
Or by hearing someone explain slavery.
There are universities that are already doing that pretty, you know.
I mean, yeah, like UChicago is kind of, you know, like that.
Patrick Henry, I mean, mainly Christian universities, like Patrick Henry College is doing, and pumping people into politics.
What if Liberty University, without the Jesus, but with Elon Musk?
And that's what I think most of those- I would say more like the ones that don't accept public funding, like Patrick Henry or St.
Andrews.
But, like, I think that idea is that most of the colleges like that, that, like, I think, you know, Kristen, you and I are familiar with because of, you know, our background and the work we do looking at, like, the religious right in America.
There are lots of colleges and universities and schools like that for people who come at it from a religious angle.
But there is nothing There is, there's St.
John's, but there's not like a, there's not like a, like a, like a, there is not a tech intern factory.
I mean, that's the purpose that it's serving.
But there are colleges that have a, that kind of ideological Not a lot of them.
I do think this is something a little bit new.
Someone said it's like a Bible college for libertarians, but for libertarians.
Again, there's an argument being made that this is a little bit what St.
John's College is, but nothing to funnel people directly into tech jobs, I don't think.
I mean, and that's what this sounds like, just reading the website and like reading between the lines and understanding who's funding this and what they're actually saying.
Like, I don't feel like it's out of bounds to say, like, this looks like an internship program for VC.
Like, I mean, this is exactly what, if we take them at their word, as like reductive and silly as their words are, and as bare bones as the website is, if we look at what they're actually doing, it really does look like that.
Like, I mean, you know.
I think culture, but they're being sold as a culture war.
Right.
And which the culture war is also, it's also a big part of it, right?
I mean, it does feel like, like when you look at like what this whole, not just the University of Austin, but you know, the kind of anti-wokeism in general, like what is wokeism in their terms?
You know, what are they actually combating?
And the thing is they're combating, you know, DEI initiatives in sort of the workplace.
or combating any kind of attempt to kind of look at diversity for the first part, but also like this kind of any sense of like having to acknowledge structural issues or a kind of a history of these problems, but they will always kind of come out and say, well, we're not the conservatives but they will always kind of come out and say, well, We're not heartless.
We're not.
We are people who really care.
Like, look, you know, many of our founders are gay or, you know, we have people of color on our staff.
We have all these things.
We support these kinds of things.
We just think that the left is going too far, that they are, you know, engaging in these things that are just kind of you know, against the structure of the way our society works.
And ultimately, we're trying to solve these problems.
We're doing it in a realistic way.
And that has enormous cachet.
That has enormous, you know.
In the tech world in particular, where there is a huge contingent that deeply resents the idea that the industry and its impact and its culture might be subjected to the same kind of cultural examination that any other part of it is.
It's the idea that we're tech people, we do pure life of the mind stuff We work from first principles and solve problems.
Why are all these liberal arts grads telling us that we need to?
We definitely need to do an episode about the Californian ideology at some point, I think.
It's weird to me that they think they need a university since, I mean, this industry has been so kind of antagonistic and convinced that university education is unnecessary.
I guess it's just the aesthetics of it, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah, because it's not a real, it's not a real, you know, they don't, it's just the bare bones.
Like, I don't think there's going to be much to it.
One of the things, one of the, one of the real undercurrents in the tech industry is also, like, the arrival of, like, code schools that, like, you know, you don't even necessarily have to have a college degree.
It's just like a six-month boot camp for how to write Python, you know, programs or something like that.
And they tend to have That tends to be looked down on even when the programs in particular are good, but like a lot of them are also basically just grifty mills that people get funneled into.
But there's a genuine interest in other educational models that produce people who would be Good employees in the tech world, but not necessarily, oh boy, isn't it expensive to go get a four-year degree?
No, there's all those other subjects that you have to take.
And then you might actually start saying, hey, we should add other gender options to our user login form.
And I mean, you know, it's too early to say, but like that particular emphasis on feeding the intern, you know, the intern mill and the existence the intern mill and the existence of a non-trivial slice of the tech industry that really resents the intrusion of societal considerations.
And also higher education.
Yeah.
And we'll often point to like actual like problems with higher education and use that as ammunition.
I just think, you know, as you say, you know, loads of them will say, oh, well, some of us are gay and some of us are women and stuff like that.
Well, Yeah, and what you all are as capitalists, or people who are doing very well from capitalism, or aligned with capitalism.
Capitalists and white supremacists, yeah.
So, I think this leads me into what I'd like to end this episode on, and we're having a great conversation.
I think we'll take some time going through this, but I do have the website open, and I did want to go through just some of the people who are actually involved in this, from day one.
And I think things will become very clear.
So, our founding trustees on the website, Pano Kanellos, who we talked about already.
Joe Lonsdale, who we talked about already.
Barry Weiss, who we talked about already.
I wish it was just a photo of the line in the Google bottle here, but it actually is a photo of her.
Heather Hying is a founding trustee.
Hello, Heather.
Yes, I remember seeing that.
That's that's one reason I wanted to ask you if you were doing an episode.
Yeah.
Brett is Brett.
Neither Weinstein brother is actually on this, but Heather is.
So that's, you know, trouble in paradise, perhaps, or, you know, who knows?
And and this this this is this is one where I've been saving this.
Niall Ferguson is also on this list.
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
Those are our founding trustees for this university.
The Board of Advisors, who I'm not going to go through.
Niall, Cain's only thought that about capitalism because he was gay.
Ferguson.
Right.
I don't have a ton of personal knowledge of Ferguson, so if you'd like to give us the high points here, that would be a good use of our time.
Disgusting bigoted apologist for imperialism.
And I think all you have to do is like look at his Wikipedia page to learn that about him.
He calls himself a fully paid up member of the neo-imperialist gang.
Yeah.
Wow.
I need to we need to plan an episode on Donald Ferguson, apparently.
So I'm up for that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, you know, he's actually he's married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, isn't he?
Oh, is he?
Oh, that's interesting.
Oh, is that true?
Yeah, I believe so.
God, I better check.
You know what?
I remember reading an anti-Muslim screed.
Yes.
Oh, yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
That makes so much.
Oh, my God.
Because so I did my first master's degree on torture and I was reading all the... How did you end up on this?
You did your first master's degree on torture and you end up being a friend of this podcast?
I don't understand how that happened.
On US torture policy.
And I was reading all of the the writers at the time who were Deeply, the anti-Islam ideologues, and he was one of them in the early 2000s.
So Kristen, you know, you've studied this.
Can I ask, you know, torture, good or bad?
Bad!
It turns out it's bad.
But you only say that because you're like a liberal cuck, right?
It was an international relations degree.
I wrote my thesis on U.S.
torture policy.
Because I think given the existence of Barry Weiss in this project, you know?
I have a feeling that, like, if there was a, like, torture master's degree that you could get from the University of Austin, it would be, torture is actually good and useful, you know?
Especially if it's done against Palestinians.
I've just checked.
I was right.
They are married.
You know that Alan Dershowitz wrote an academic paper in favor of torture, and it was right after 9-11.
Yep.
Yep.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, I'm very versed in Mr. Dershowitz.
Yeah, possibly another future episode.
People still called him a civil rights lawyer and a liberal at this.
Can I, can I, can we do a, I'm sorry, I know we're running long, but I have, I have my favorite anecdote.
My favorite Alan Dershowitz anecdote is the movie Chasing Amy, if you're familiar with it.
This is the worst, this is the most terrifying setup I can imagine.
So, initially, when they submitted Chasing Amy to the MPAA, it was going to get an NC-17, and it actually was released with an R rating after Alan Dershowitz defended Miramax at the MPAA.
Like it was literally.
He's just been in, had his, had his, he's just been involved in everything.
How did he?
I think he was like deeply invested in like Harvey Weinstein, you know, and I think that was kind of, he was like in-house like arguing for, you know, all that sort of thing.
I think that's just kind of how he got there.
So he's just like the Forrest Gump of knowing shitty people.
And I have big problems with chasing Amy now, but it was a big, big movie for me back in the day.
Anyway, let's look through, not Alan Dershowitz.
So far, maybe he'll join later, you know, but, you know, let's let's just walk through.
I'm not going to name every name because I don't know a lot of these people.
There might be a decent human being among them, but we'll see.
So I'm just going to list the ones that who I know You know, personally.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the list.
Glenn Lowry.
Steven Pinker.
Yeah.
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
Lex Friedman, who you might know, is like he does this he does this podcast where he's like interviewed all of these like skeptosphere, you know, IDW sphere people.
He's like a professor at MIT.
Dorian Abbott, who I believe, I actually don't know this by heart, but I believe he is like an anti-climate change person, but he is described as a geophysicist at the University of Chicago.
Somebody wants to Google that for me.
Every idea must be up for discussion, even the patently wrong and disproved ones.
That's a good way to spend your time.
Jonathan Haidt.
Oh, wow.
We'll definitely be doing a podcast about him at some point.
You know, Larry Summers, we mentioned already.
Caitlin Flanagan, writer at The Atlantic.
Andrew Sullivan, who, you know, Charles Murray's favorite buddy, you know.
Abbott has been protesting at speaking engagements for Arguing against equity, diversity and inclusion.
Right, that's the thing.
That's right.
That's where I had his name in my head.
Yes, yes.
Where's the faculty?
Loads of, you know, Atlantic journalists and people like this.
Don't you have to be...
They have to be qualified as a teacher to teach people, or am I just being old-fashioned?
These are not just thinkers, they're the doers, Jack.
These are the Board of Advisors.
To my knowledge, they don't have an actual faculty.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Fair enough.
Tyler Cohen.
Tyler Cohen, an economist at George Mason, definitely received Koch money at some point.
David Mamet, who we mentioned earlier.
Stacey Hawk, mentioned earlier.
You know, founding faculty fellows.
These are our three founding faculty fellows on this list.
These are the people, sort of the ideological leaders of this thing.
Two of them, at least two of them, have been making waves in the news in the last week or so.
One is Kathleen Stock.
Oh yeah.
Oh no!
Was she just quit her job and claimed she was forced out, right?
She quit her job!
Imagine, like, oh my god, you quit your job.
You left because you were just so oppressed by the rookies and trans people.
Did you follow this?
That's what she said.
Did you follow this?
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Okay, yeah.
She quit her job because she was being hounded and bullied by the merciless trans people and woke people at the university.
But really she was just moving to Austin.
None of these people have actually moved to Austin, or very few of them have.
They're all just advising from afar and presumably receiving some kind of salary off of that $10 million.
We must always remember that so far this university is purely just a conceptual university that exists only in a lawyer's office.
Which is weird that they would name it after a city.
Well, it's good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan.
It's just pure coincidence that after she was hounded out of her university, I think it was Sussex, wasn't it?
She has this new gig.
I don't know, I'm not sure.
She's very fortunate that after getting hounded out, just this $10 million gig with a virtual university.
I don't know.
I don't know how she's had the time, you know, to arrange this new job now that she's been silenced, which mysteriously has involved being on just about every television show and British television and interviewed by every periodical in the British media.
But somehow she managed it.
It's amazing.
You just need to start looking at who left a well-paid position in the last six months to understand how long this project has actually kind of been planned for.
Like there's, I kind of get the sense that like back in like November, 2020 or so people started, I said it's more than six months, but you know what I mean?
Like back end of last year, there were sort of rumblings of we're going to do something like this.
And like sort of the VC money started to like, Following some of these people.
I'm genuinely curious if, like, Barry, just like Leroy Jenkins, the announcement, like... I really think that might have been what happened.
It was a joke, but I talked myself into it.
Like, okay, mid-February, the campaign starts, but, oh, Barry!
Well, when she published her sub stack, she linked to the website, so.
Yeah, no, I think, I think, I think, I don't think it was a, I think, I think they, I don't know why they announced it at this time.
I think it really is like, it only has to be bare bones.
It only has to be enough to attract the worst people in the, in the world.
It just needs to be enough to generate buzz, investment and get the ball rolling.
Yeah.
It does seem like a website written by business degreed people who only have to generate buzz and don't have to know how to It's a relatively polite way of saying it's illiterate.
It's a website written by people who think that after the Civil Rights Act, there was no more reason to think that black people had a hard time in the United States.
Like that's, that's, that's literally what this is.
Second person on this three person list of foundation faculty fellows, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
And the number one person, and the one that... So we've had Clotho, that's Lachesis, now we're up to Atropos.
Go for it.
Peter Boghossian.
Peter Boghossian.
Who we will definitely be doing an episode about soon.
I promise it.
You haven't?
Oh, well, yeah.
Oh, he's from PSA.
He was the one who wrote the book with Conceptual James.
He was James Lindsay's best buddy.
James Lindsay, not on this list.
See, this is the higher tier.
These are the people with academic credentials who are going to come and whitewash all of the other stuff.
Because James Lindsay is talking about his dick on Twitter all day.
You know, that is it's a packed schedule.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the more you talk about the dick, you know, the bigger it is.
That's what we always know about these things.
That's how influencing works.
Yeah.
Does Ayaan Hershey Ali have academic credentials at all?
No, but she's Sam Harris's best friend.
She's Sam Harris's best friend, and that's enough.
She was just a politician.
She is described on the website as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Oh, all right.
This really just feels like sort of an ideological click.
I mean, I don't want to cast aspersions, but... That's very cynical, Jeff.
I mean, if you wanted to have like open inquiry into all fields of discovery about the nature of human life, you know... Fearless pursuit of truth.
Yeah.
Which, seriously, what adult talks that way?
Honestly, that's so embarrassing.
I know!
The whole thing was so embarrassing.
Yeah, I can't, I can't imagine.
But the target market doesn't have to find it embarrassing.
The target market just has to find it worth investing in.
Yeah.
Well, they have to be able to decode the dog whistles, don't they?
You know.
I feel like it's not going to be about free inquiry.
I feel like some people would not be treated with a lot of civility, to be honest.
No.
You know, civility just means endlessly platforming racists, and free inquiry just means talking about how black people have lower IQs.
They know what these things mean.
All right, that's the end of what I have right now, so let's chat and then finish it up.
I have one thing, which is Michael Hobbs on Twitter, who's pretty good on this stuff.
Very good on this stuff, yep.
He raised something about the announcement by, what is it, UATX?
And he quoted a bit where they talk about You know, college students, surveys which supposedly show that college students feel that they're being, that they're not allowed to say what they want.
You know, and this other thing about disinvitations, you know, professors and people being invited and then disinvited.
And he points out that, you know, they're misrepresenting the surveys.
They're misrepresenting what the surveys say.
And of course, you know, students saying, you know, I stopped myself saying something because I felt that I shouldn't say it or couldn't say it.
You know, that could mean anything.
We all do that all the time.
It's ridiculous scaremongering.
But it was quoted by somebody else on Twitter called MixDEAnderson.
And I found it really interesting because they actually went through what the survey said about all these people who were invited and then disinvited to speak at various universities.
And, I mean, just to read some of these tweets.
I'm quoting now.
They're including Doris Kearns Goodwin's disinvitations following revelations of plagiarism.
139 of these incidents are pressure from the right wing.
They're conflating what happens here between speakers being disinvited and academics being censored, which are different things.
The list includes Ward Churchill being disinvited from small private Christian colleges for his essay stating that 9-11 was a natural consequence of American imperialism.
They're including speakers disinvited because of pro-Palestinian views.
73 of the 229 are from the right, 126 from the left and 30 are non-aligned.
Many of the non-aligned listed as non-aligned are actually from the right and it you know there's several tweets in this and it just goes through and it's just I mean you know it's it's not shocking to anybody that knows how these people operate but it kind of even so it kind of is shocking because the the naked dishonesty And this has been going on for decades.
It's not a new thing.
I mean, Dick Cheney's wife?
Was that who was compiling lists of professors who were viewed as too far?
Oh this was this was a thing this was a thing back in like the 2000s.
The George W. Bush administration.
This has been going on since I was in college.
It was named David Horowitz made wrote a book that was like a hundred academics that are destroying America or something to that effect.
Jordan Peterson wanted to like do a website where people could do that but then it turned out running a website was hard.
So David Horowitz tried to organize some of this at my campus and he worked with Art Pope and a conservative think tank in North Carolina, I mean in the late 90s, to
Conservative students were invited in and urged to go in and report on whether they felt uncomfortable in their classes, and they published findings that I guess a majority of professors were registered as Democrats.
I was there in those years.
It was not like a leftist.
It was people placating evangelicals from the South all the time.
People were recently recording their classrooms.
That happened in the late 90s when I was at UNC.
A lot of this has already happened.
Horowitz came directly because there was an anti-war teach-in in 2001, and he got all this hate speech drummed up against, like threats and stuff drummed up against professors I had.
It's almost like this theme being used to explain why this new university is so profoundly necessary for the survival of Western civilization is in fact just a generations-long refrain.
It's just a tactic that they've been using for, yeah.
Yeah.
Daniel, you earlier mentioned Walter Williams.
Walter Williams was on the board of the Bruin Alumni Association, which was behind something called uclaprofs.com, which was like this initiative to publicly expose the UCLA radical professors.
And there's loads of things like this, isn't there?
Yeah.
No, this goes on, I mean, you know, it is not hard to find examples of this, you know, this is... No, it's been going on.
Absolutely.
It's been a movement for decades, and it was because of all of that that that Western Civ White Supremacist Program got started at UNC, because they drummed up all this panic about, well, the majority of our professors are Democrats, oh my god!
So, yeah, this is not new, it's Yeah, but it does have a lot more cultural cachet than it used to, I would say.
Yeah, like a lot of extreme right-wing ideas, it's been steadily and very successfully mainstreamed, hasn't it?
Yeah.
Which of course, that's what this whole thing is about.
This new Austin University thing, it's another step in the same process.
And I think that was, you know, earlier when I was saying like, what's the worst case scenario, it was less like, I think this is going to be a new and successful educational model for like, it feels like a next step.
It does.
That process that you mentioned, that mainstreaming of the concept.
Like in 20 years this idea that like well this is what the university is actually supposed to be doing and in the same way that like you know the media isn't safe for you know the right and that's why we have to build this parallel universe of you know media and news like the idea that
An explicitly ideological educational institution that exists to fast track someone like Fox News does with news could be a good and important thing is getting the like the substack heterodox thinkers treatment now.
Suddenly, I mean, there's that.
I mean, I'm just thinking like there's something like the bigger that gets, the more the pressure on like hiring committees and sociology departments to hire, you know, Professor Golden Eagle dot Facebook to be there, to be there, you know, heterodox faculty, you know, to be, you know, and suddenly take those ideas seriously.
And this is something I mean, we talk about race and IQ a lot here, but like, this is literally a long term project going back to the.
Yeah.
of like introducing like eugenics into the stuff.
And suddenly if you're a researcher looking at IQ, if you're a researcher looking at genetics, you have to engage with these ideas, not because they have merit, but because they're within the academy.
And so there is this, there is this kind of long-term goal of like pushing all of these ideas in there.
And so suddenly, you know, anytime you start talking about structural inequality, you've then got the like, well, professor so-and-so at Harvard who got in through this kind of like, you know, right-wing project has very different ideas and has, you need to look at that.
Have you consulted with the heterodox studies department?
Right.
Have you consulted with the actually black people just deserve it department?
The fact that people who refer to themselves as political centrists are pushing to take Charles Murray seriously should be very concerning.
I just remember how he was treated in political science, a pretty conservative field, when I was coming up as an undergraduate.
I mean, treated with just the utmost scorn and the derision he deserves.
This is just unbelievable.
Don't you know the American Enterprise Institute is a center-left organization now?
But just like they've figured out that it's a winning PR strategy to link any treatment of structural white supremacy in American law and American history to scary old Marxism and scary old Jews from Europe, etc.
They've worked out that they can sell Charles Murray to a certain set of people who are liberals or think of themselves as liberals and centrists by saying, oh, well, look at these students who are out of control.
They protested him at Middlebury.
It's really bleak.
to shut down the debate it's authoritarianism 1984 next thing they're going to be telling you what to think they work they this works on enough of these people that it's a winning strategy yeah it's really bleak i mean as as tenure is being phased out and and and actual academics have less you know power than ever before i would say in the united states
someone who who cared at one time about the academy who was invested in was in a in a philosophy phd program i would be i I would be very concerned being in the classroom now, and it's been 10 years since I've been out.
I think I would be terrified to teach anything I cared about.
And I would expect to be recorded and to be questioned and contacted incessantly by parents about my ideology.
I'm actually glad that that didn't work out, that I had a health crisis and had to leave.
Because I would not have wanted to be doing, you know, that combined with the pandemic.
Yeah.
I mean, very rarely is the, I'm very glad I had a health crisis.
I would not want to be a women's studies slash philosophy professor right now.
I don't know, with people expecting me to, especially with what's going on in philosophy, I mean, with people like Kathleen Stock and yeah.
And to connect this back to Nazis, just again, I don't speak German, so we got to connect it to Nazis, you know.
Yeah.
Viktor Orban, one of the first things he did, was banned gender studies in universities in Hungary.
And Viktor Orban has been like, he is like the absolute, like the actual neo-Nazis, like the don't like Viktor Orban because they think he's too friendly to Jews.
But he is, like Tucker Carlson spent a week doing episodes in Hungary.
Like he is absolutely this, you know, kind of figure, like a worship figure among certain parts of the right.
This is what they're, they're, they're just going to ban all this eventually if they, if they, if they, and like with a, with a, you know, five, four or six, three, you know, right-leaning Supreme Court, Especially with 7-2, if Stephen Breyer dies sometime in the next couple of years, who knows what's going to happen?
And you saw all this strategy being laid out growing up in a red state, I would say.
Before it became mainstream.
I remember 15 years ago, the Republicans in North Carolina were talking about needing to defund gender studies programs, as you can see.
Growing up in like the Midwest or like a red state and seeing this stuff happen is now like the, I saw pavement play in a church basement one time of like watching terrible people.
It was the, you know, it was where all of this was, you know, it was at one time it was considered radical and now it's become very.
Now it's just mainstream.
It's not cool anymore.
No, now it's the mainstream conservative movement.
Well, we at least can enjoy the fact that Barry and Friends are going to give us some ridiculous pratfalls while they try to execute it.
I mean, with all these people in tech behind it, they couldn't come up with a professional website?
Have you considered that they might have been co-sponsored by Squarespace?
I need to check Barry Weiss's podcast ads for the next few weeks.
Yeah.
I think it would have been better, to be honest, if they just used Squip, a Squarespace template.
No, it is.
It's a Squarespace site.
You mean, it is a Squarespace?
No, yeah, I checked.
Oh, it really is?
Actually, it is a Squarespace site.
I thought you were just joking about that.
No, no, literally.
First thing I do is like, well, what CMS are they using?
So they have like a $16 a month subscription that they'll...
I really enjoy the idea, though, that Squarespace is maybe going to have to roll out some new templates.
They've got, oh, do you have a local restaurant?
Do you have like a, are you a chiropractor?
Are you a higher education institution?
That's great.
That's brilliant.
I love it.
I wonder who's paying for their Squarespace subscription.
We need to look into it.
It's going to be really funny if the VC behind Squarespace, if Lonsdale is back there in the background and is like, oh, don't worry, we can cut that $16 a month out of our budget.
It's going to be fine.
I've seen stranger higher education website hosting decisions made than like, well, one of our investors just says it has to be hosted on Squarespace.
Is it possible that Barry Weiss just put it together in an afternoon?
I'm writing, I have a sub stack coming out about it.
We have to have a website.
Someday there's going to be an oral history of the making of this website and it's going to be amazing.
The funny thing is just how honest it is when you actually read between the lines.
That's the thing that got me when I was reading through it.
It's like, no, no, they're telling us what they're doing.
It's clear.
It's an intern factory, and in several years, they may actually have a physical location.
Well, as long as this stuff exists, we're going to have material to dine out on.
That's the optimistic note to wrap on, I think.
Yeah, for us, it's going to be great.
Richard Belzer did an interview on The Daily Show right before George W. Bush was elected and said, if that man wins, you and I will dine like kings.
That's the beauty of being in this business.
So tell us where we can find you on the internet.
Well, I'm Jeff Eaton.
I'm Eaton, E-A-T-O-N on Twitter. And you can find us at CWriteCast on Twitter or rightcast.ironicallysubstack.com.
We've been meaning to change that and we haven't gotten around to it yet.
And I'm at Kristen Rawls, K-R-I-S-T-I-N-R-A-W-L-S on Twitter, and I'm pretty much only active on Twitter as social media goes.
So please, please go back and listen to our back episodes.
We are going to be making more.
We've just been really busy lately.
Yeah, listeners, do do that.
Go and subscribe to both those accounts, if for some inexplicable reason you haven't already and you listen to this show.
And do indeed go and listen to Christian Wright Cast, because it's brilliant.
It's one of my favorite podcasts.
I'm going to start from the beginning and listen to them all through again, while I wait for you guys to get your fingers out and get another one released.
We will get to it.
We will.
Thanks, Kristin, and thanks, Jeff, for joining us.
It's been brilliant.
And thanks for listening, everybody.
Goodbye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
If you enjoyed the show or found it useful, please spread the word.
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