WTW2: NYT Does Anti-woke Advocacy Instead of Journalism in James Webb Telescope Story, Part 1
This is the big one. The thing that pissed me off so effing much that it spawned an entire new project. Ok fine I admit it, Where There's Woke is a spite project. The NYT Daily Podcast did an episode on the James Webb Telescope name controversy called "When the Culture Wars Came for NASA." It's fucking terrible journalism. Just awful. Already with just the title. How about "When the Entrenched Powers at NASA Refused to Budge in the Face of Very Reasonable Concerns from the LGBTQIA+ Community It Already Marginalizes." This first part is about the Daily episode itself, and the article it was based on, with some preliminary debunking but largely accepting the coverage on its own terms. The next part will look in detail at the internal process at NASA and what the history ACTUALLY tells us about James Webb. Pledge at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic hands down.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything.
Instead of go-go boots, the seductress Green M&M will now wear sneakers.
Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas Smith.
This is episode two and we're getting into it.
This is the actual origin story of this podcast.
It all started when I was listening to The Daily, New York Times The Daily podcast, as I do every day, I guess.
And the topic for the day was the naming controversy over the James Webb Space Telescope.
And this was something that I really knew nothing about.
I'd heard like years ago, I had heard someone, I think an astronomer, a scientist on a podcast mentioned like, oh, they shouldn't name it after James Webb because he actually sucked.
I didn't.
It's just one of those things I heard.
And I kind of stuck with me because.
I love space.
I love the James Webb Space Telescope.
It's amazing.
It's one of the coolest things.
Obviously not the topic of this podcast or show, but you should check out the images that the telescope has gathered thus far.
If you haven't, they're beautiful.
They're amazing.
That much stuck with me.
Like, oh, this thing I love is yet again something named after a horrible old dead white guy who sucked.
But I didn't look into it at all.
It's been a few at least years since that happened.
I don't even remember.
And so when I saw this podcast flash upon my player, The Daily covering this, and I heard sort of the tone with which they were talking about it, it became clear to me pretty quickly, even before they said so, that this was going to be something where they would actually be defending James Webb and saying, look at these people who got this wrong and came after NASA.
And there are good reasons why that's already a bullshit thing to do, to choose to cover on your incredibly important news podcast.
We'll get to that in a minute.
But as the episode went on, not having looked into it, not knowing the background at all, just hearing the obvious bias in how this journalist was speaking about it, and how much there were internal contradictions within this episode.
There's phrasing that Michael Powell, the reporter, used that I recognized like word for word from some of the intellectual dark web people circa, I don't know, 2015.
Like, leading up to that?
To the point where I knew, like, that's no coincidence.
I know that this guy... I just knew, like, he must be in those circles.
And there was so much in the episode that made me so upset, because of how clearly wrong it was, how clearly biased it was.
And so, I posted about it, and I was met with pretty much mostly confusion.
I don't remember too many people who had the same view of it, and these are people who were...
Largely on my side politically.
And so that just set me off even more.
Nothing bothers me more than when I think I see something and other people don't.
I have to find out, am I wrong or am I right?
Like, I just have to know.
Either way, I have to know why is the thing I'm seeing not what other people are seeing.
And so I started obsessing over it and obsessing over it.
I listened to it a bunch.
I confirmed even more how internally inconsistent and terrible just the coverage on its face was.
And then as I researched more and more, it became staggering how bad this reporting was.
And I had heard on some other podcasts, You're Wrong About and If Books Could Kill, about how horrible the trans healthcare coverage has been in the New York Times.
It's absolutely nothing new to complain about the New York Times or any outlet getting a story wrong.
Happens all the time.
To different degrees, but when it's pointing to something systemic like this, that's like a different level of worry.
And I think it's worthy of shining as big a light on as we can.
And even though this is an episode from gosh, by now, since it took me since I went through this huge journey of like obsessing over that obsessing over related stories, seriously, hours upon hours upon hours of research related to this later.
And getting the idea to start this podcast, building everything for it, doing all that stuff, all that stuff later, now I'm finally talking about it.
It's May 19th's episode, called When the Culture Wars Came for NASA.
And even though it's a month old, I think it's incredibly relevant.
In the same way that when I heard about how bad the trans healthcare coverage was, And that stuff dates back years.
It was still very relevant.
It is highly relevant.
It's not just me griping about a month old podcast episode because it is indicative of the systemic problem that is going on there that I'm very worried about.
And I think there needs to be way more attention on.
I want to do what I can to further provide the information on that and shine a light on it.
It may take me three hours to tell you how bad this is.
Every single twist and turn of this got worse.
Another thing I want to do with the show is really get down into the detail with who is actually responsible for this awful coverage.
And it's not really entirely easy to know all the editorial decisions and who's making what decision and where the stuff's coming from.
But in the course of this research, I found some interesting things.
I found a sort of smoking gun into what's happening at the New York Times that I think I'll get to in, I don't know, part three?
We'll see.
But I'll get there and I really want to start putting names to it.
Like why is this happening?
So this is going to be a multi-parter and I think it will be fun and I think it will be effective to do this a bit how I uncovered things to kind of take you through the journey.
I want to just go through this daily episode and show you how many ways that even taking them at their word this episode fails miserably and shows so much blatant Bias.
In spectacularly obvious ways that the hosts, the people who made it, seem to be just completely unaware of.
As luck would have it, just recently, they put out another episode in which they showed how quote-unquote fair and balanced and objective they are when it's a different topic, when it's a different target.
How careful they are to say, well, it's allegation, let's speculate, maybe.
So I heard this episode from June 12th called Nuclear Secrets and Taped Conversations, and I was going to play this after as like, ah, look at the difference.
I think it's really useful to play it before so that we have this in mind when we listen to the NASA episode.
So you get from this tape very clear evidence that Trump, and it sounds like an aide close by, Both understand that showing this document to the people in this room at Bedminster is illegal because they don't have the right credentials, the right clearance to see this stuff.
Certainly that's the case that's made in the indictment and I'm always hesitant to say what he knew was illegal or didn't know was illegal, but certainly what the indictment is laying out there is you're establishing his knowledge of the law.
One of his central defenses all along is that, oh, I declassified these.
These documents were mine.
I declassified them.
But you have them literally on tape saying, no, I didn't declassify this and I could have.
And I'm not one to judge what a smoking gun is, but I bet prosecutors feel that that recording is as close as you're going to get.
Yeah, they have a recording of him saying, yes, I did the crime.
I know that it's a crime.
I did the crime.
Here I am doing the do-to-do, doing crime stuff, doing the crime.
I know it's a crime.
Do you know it's a crime?
Yeah, I know it's a crime.
Okay, we all know it's a crime, everybody?
We know it's a crime.
Cut to the daily.
Yeah, I'm hesitant to say, you know, what's in someone's heart.
What someone knew.
But, you know, certainly people, prosecutors would say that the indictment said that, yeah, this is it.
And they can't even call something a smoking gun.
Like, this is a smoking gun.
The soft link.
Well, prosecutors would say, they would say, like, if this is the closest thing To a smoking gun.
They're apparently not gonna say it's a smoking gun, but they would say they would I wouldn't say this they would like it's just so bending over backwards.
I get maybe legal stuff or something or Trump or I don't know what the reason for the sensitivity is but I feel like it would be pretty responsible.
to just tell the facts of what's going on here and then say, and look, this is definitely an indictment and it's alleged and people are innocent until proven guilty, but they are saying they have a tape of this.
So for this to be wrong, they would have to be lying about a tape.
Like they would have had to go after the former president of the United States with more scrutiny than has been on any indictment in the history of time.
And they would have had to do an indictment with a fake recording and just be like, well, we'll get away.
Is it fine?
You don't need the scare quotes, the careful language.
I get you can say innocent until proven guilty and you can say alleged.
Sure.
But like, give us the context that for this to be not correct, they'd have to be fabricating a tape.
That would be incredibly unlikely to happen.
All right.
So with that carefulness in mind, and maybe that is responsible, I actually don't, No, I'm not like a real journalist.
Maybe the way this is covered is the responsible way to do it.
Okay, well, let's contrast that with what happened on the NASA episode.
This episode of The Daily is called, When the Culture Wars Came for NASA.
I want to note that The Daily is one of, if not the most popular podcast in terms of news That there is.
It's frequently the top of the charts.
The New York Times is obviously something you'd be familiar with as an institution.
Truly, people call it the paper of record.
And some people, tongue in cheek, call this the podcast of record, which I think is kind of funny and is probably true.
And I want you to take a second to think about what you ought to expect in terms of journalistic integrity and rigor and all that from the podcast of record.
This is not me podcasting out of my spare bedroom with a shitty mic in the time I have opining.
This is The New York Times.
And I said opining.
This is very important.
The guest is Michael Powell.
And Michael Powell is not part of the opinion page.
If Michael Powell were part of the opinion page, I would be very annoyed at this episode.
I would be still probably pretty mad about it, but I would at least think, OK, they've got an asshole with an opinion.
Fine.
It's incredibly biased.
It misses a lot.
It has a lot of blind spots, but it's one of their fucking opinion, guys.
All right.
Whatever.
But no, no, no.
This is not opinion.
This is Michael Powell, who has started a new beat, as they discuss on the show.
And the beat is free speech and intellectual debate.
What it really is, is shockingly close to Things the intellectual dark web would be mad about, if you still remember what that is.
Can't wait to get to those folks.
Or things people who are like center-left but hate woke people are mad about.
That's basically the beat, and rarely does it stray away from his beat, and I'm gonna cover more of it.
Rarely does it stray from the formula of, well, here's an instance of one person in the quote-unquote woke crowd being wrong.
So already, you have the classic issues with view-from-nowhere journalism.
Right away, before we even get to how well objectivity was modeled in this episode, before we even get to that, there are so many problems with that endeavor in general that we can briefly touch on.
There's the fact that balanced reporting, quote unquote, may create a false equivalence.
Classic example.
Hey, we found a climate change expert and an idiot, and they are the two views.
Let's hear what they have to say, and now you have given the impression that there is a 50-50 debate, and that is skewing the truth.
There are so many ways that things that seem reasonable or objective actually aren't, and there is just no way in my opinion to truly be objective, because the minute you are deciding what to put in your newspaper or on your podcast, that is a decision with great consequence.
It is not merely the case that, were the words true or not true, That is not enough.
It really isn't.
If I had a newspaper, or a TV channel, where all I did every day was cover the details of a gruesome murder committed by a black person or something.
And that's all I- every day, I just covered that.
And I stuck to the God's honest truth on the details of that.
That would be incredibly fucking racist.
And it would give the viewers a very skewed view of what's happening in their world.
It's not enough to say, well, it's true, though.
It's all true, everything I said.
And that's an extreme example, of course, but it's not as outlandish as you might think, given that Fox News exists.
But that principle is important.
You have to make some decisions, but you can at least do your best to provide proper context.
So when I saw this, push play on that episode, again, when the culture wars came for NASA.
Very interesting.
Wasn't sure what they'd be getting out with that title.
And then I hear it's about James Webb.
I, an idiot who still kind of trusted the New York Times and didn't know who Michael Powell was, thought, oh, well, this is interesting.
I wonder if this'll be one of those times where the Quote-unquote woke mob, or what I consider, you know, progressive people who want to make the world better and more inclusive.
I wonder if this will be a time they were wrong.
I thought, oh great, this is gonna be an asshole coming on.
Rubbing it in our faces that there was an example where the progressives were wrong.
Oh, actually James Webb was fine.
Even if this is an example of progressives being incorrect about a shitty person from the past and saying, stop naming things after shitty people.
Even if Michael Powell were correct, if the thesis of this episode were correct, right away, by only reporting this, like just giving us, again, the podcast of record, a massive, massive podcast, taking the opportunity to say, ah, Look at these progressive leftists who, they're so dumb, they thought this guy was evil because his Wikipedia page said he was evil and a homophobe.
And look at these idiots.
They're so dumb.
They were wrong about that.
How frustrating that they were wrong about a guy.
Well, I would appreciate some context on that.
How often are they right?
How many really important things do we have in this country that are named after awful racists of different sorts?
How many things do we have where people have fought tooth and nail to keep the name that is by some awful racist of some kind?
Do we have a lot of those?
Does that happen a lot?
Does that happen a little?
Is this the first thing?
Like, give me the context.
Give your listeners or readers the proper context in which to set this.
And if you do, a more accurate way of couching this, even just right from the get-go, I haven't even gotten to word one of this thing, Right away, it seems pretty stupid to be like, well, one of the times, though, the dead white guy was like, not that bad.
One of the times.
So if you think about it, it's a tie.
Not even a tie!
If you think about it, this mob is always wrong.
Because this one time, one of the dead white guys was like, he was like a C plus instead of an F minus.
That's terrible.
That's not the proper context.
That is like taking the one time a climate scientist made, I don't know, an algebra error or something and had to like retract a paper and be like, and they were like, oh shit, messed up that one.
That's already you've started on a terrible footing.
Not only that, listen to the wording of the title.
Again, this is reporting.
This is not opinion.
When the culture wars came for NASA.
Boy, that's a little bit of loaded language, isn't it?
So NASA is a pristine place free of culture wars.
The default of NASA is, well, we're fine.
We're NASA.
Everything we do up till now has been completely fine and no one complained.
This is the first time the culture wars have sullied our sacred space stations or whatever.
That's pretty loaded.
Like, what if there was a report on racial bias in a given, I don't know, police jurisdiction or something, and a report comes out and a bunch of people protest and are like, hey, what the fuck, man?
Which, frankly, we could be doing every day.
And you wrote, boy, when the culture wars came for this police station, I mean, what about the culture war of being racist?
When you're, the status quo, when you're in the position of authority, the racism, the bias you might have, the wrongs you might be committing, they're not the culture wars, quote unquote.
They're just NASA.
Any racism, homophobia, bias, gender, what, anything, anything, I'm not even alleging things, I'm just saying hypothetically, any of that, that gets to be NASA.
That's all priced in.
The mostly white leaders of NASA, which is that 14 official administrators and several at least as many acting administrators and all but and I'm just doing a quick visual check.
Looks like all but two have been white men.
All of them have been men.
Everything they do, that's NASA.
Anytime anyone complains about that and says, I think you're doing something wrong here.
You need to adjust what you're doing.
That's the culture wars coming for NASA.
So this first phase is going to be taking the New York Times mostly at its word.
There are a few places where I have to chime in with some of the research I've done.
It's the only place it makes sense.
Otherwise, I'll have to go back later.
But after this first run, then there's the research I've done.
And boy, if you think it fails the first time, you'll be surprised the second time how much worse it fails.
So I'll be honest, from my end, I'm going to have to go through this entire thing and then I'll try to just like edit out any of the things I said or the parts of the podcast that didn't matter or something.
But like, just telling you from my perspective, I'm so mad about this thing.
I literally cannot not go through this entire episode of The Daily And annotate it for you?
Rest assured I'm gonna try to trim as much as I can from the main show.
But I will say, here's the thing.
I'm sure many if not most of you listen to podcasts on higher speeds and are probably listening to me on a higher speed right now.
I am stuck in the real where I would need to play the daily at 1x speed so that you hear it the same speed with me.
But I actually think I'll die if I do that.
So here's what I'm gonna do, and apologies if this causes any trouble, I'm gonna play it at 1.25.
I think that's gotta be, you know, so if you're at 1.5 of me, then we can do some, you know, do some math that gets a little complicated.
Get out a calculator.
I think that'll be enough so it doesn't sound like super duper duper fast, but if I play it at 1x, I'm gonna die.
I just will, so.
And maybe that'll help trim the time of going through this.
But all right, here we go.
And you're here, Michael, to talk about how this kind of a battle came to, of all places, NASA, the nation's premier space agency.
Recording.
Going.
So where does that story start?
OK, can you tell me your name and who you are?
Yes, I'm Dr. Hakim Oluseyi.
It starts with this, frankly, very impressive man.
Dr. Hakim Oluseyi.
I am an astrophysicist, and I'm newly a research faculty fellow at Princeton's Plasma Physics Laboratory.
So he's a member of the small elite club of black physicists.
In fact, he's the president of the National Society of Black Physicists.
And he himself comes out of a background that really kind of made it unlikely that you'd ever see him as a scientist.
So he had this kind of itinerant childhood.
His father was a drug dealer.
His mother had a very tough time of it.
His parents divorced when he was only four years old and he was never in the same place for more than a few years at a time.
New Orleans, Los Angeles, Houston.
Eventually, his family settles in rural Mississippi.
Alright, frankly, very impressive, man.
Truly a hero.
And look, there's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but I just would like to note it.
Because take a guess right now if you're going to hear A, from literally a single voice on the other side of this, and B, if you did hear that, which you already know the answer is no.
Would they also be described as impressive?
Because they very much are.
If anything, the people on the other side of this have Hakeem's story plus more.
They're like more marginalized.
And I guarantee you, I actually know for a fact they have very interesting upbringings and histories.
Right off the bat, I want to say, this may sound like nitpicking.
It could be to some extent, but you've only heard the very first example.
When you start to hear how many of these are, I think it actually becomes important.
If it was one or two things, yeah, nitpicking, whatever.
If it's 40 things, then no, I need to pick up part of the pattern.
I need to establish the pattern.
So, right away, first thing.
And it becomes a bit of a love story to Hakim.
I'll skip over this part.
Inspirational music, inspirational story, not taking anything away from the story.
It is inspirational, but it has a profound psychological impact.
Who you get to place with that underlying music and tell their inspirational story, their childhood, how they got into this.
That has a profound impact on what your perceptions of this argument are going to be.
I wish this podcast rose to the level of both sides journalism.
That would be a step up from what this is.
And one day in 2015, he's reading this online article.
You know, I'm doing my normal, you know, take a break between work and just go get lost on the internet, right?
Go down some rabbit hole.
And he comes across this rather stunning story involving NASA's Deep Space Telescope, the most powerful such telescope ever made.
And it's named after James Webb, former administrator of NASA during the whole moon launch effort.
And the article argues that he is absolutely not deserving of that honor.
In fact, the title of the article is The Problem with Naming Observatories for Bigots.
Would you mind, kind of in a sense, walk through the accusations, like one by one.
What's the bill of indictment against James Webb?
They were pretty explicit.
They said James Webb was a homophobe who ruined the lives and careers of gay federal employees in the 1940s and 50s.
That article argued that before coming to NASA, James Webb had led purges of gay employees while at the State Department.
And it quotes him, saying really inflammatory things about getting rid of gay employees.
And the writer, who's a journalist and a physicist, says that this is a sort of moral reckoning, that we cannot, in the 21st century, honor a man such as this by putting his name on a space telescope that is going to be used the world round.
For instance, this journalist writes, it's easy for white male physicists like me to ignore the less savory aspects of our scientific heroes, but it's long past time we stopped.
So James Webb is facing pretty serious allegations of discriminatory behavior that would not seem to make him a great candidate to have his name emblazoned on NASA's premier supertelescope.
That's right.
I mean, it looks on the face of it pretty bad.
Right.
And what does Hakeem Oluseyi make of these claims?
You know, I'm appalled, right?
I'm like, oh, you got to be kidding me.
The James Webb Space Telescope?
You know, this is bigger than Hubble is going to be.
Hakeem is completely taken aback.
He's on a Facebook page with other black, Latino and gay physicists.
Everybody's worked up about this.
I saw people in that Facebook group talking about how they felt about seeing this and how they felt about NASA and their nation.
And what about the youth coming up, right?
I felt like they too would even be more tortured by it, right?
You're newly coming into this field, this is the latest, greatest data, and you have to deal with someone that you feel, you know, literally would hate you and persecute you if they were alive today.
And there is a request, because he is a prominent physicist, that Hakeem join them in denouncing this and pushing NASA to do something to change this.
And that request is basically take Webb's name off the telescope.
Off the telescope, yes.
And Hakeem gives that some thought.
So the first thing I do is I decide, let me research this, you know, not deeply, just do a Google search.
And I found another article that had been written five, six months earlier by Dan Savage in Seattle that basically This is kind of minor, but also kind of not.
The Dan Savage article he's referencing, yes, it repeats some of the same information, some of the same claims.
But the actual point of the article was Dan Savage, a gay man, saying we shouldn't care about this.
It's literally him being like, eh, we have bigger fish.
By the way, I hate that fucking article and that same argument people use all the time.
Oh, we have bigger fish to fry.
There's more to do.
We really get distracted by this.
Always setting up the progressives who want to make something more inclusive and less shitty.
Setting that up as like, here, I'm going to police your time.
I'm going to tell you what you do and don't have time for.
As though there aren't 11 billion people who could maybe take different jobs in this.
How about we'll have two people who are really strong advocates.
They're going to lobby hard for this.
Everybody else, hey, go do all the other stuff.
That's cool.
Movements of any kind do not work like that.
Nobody is ever like, hey, we all, hey, look over here.
Hey, look, hey, you.
You, looking at the James Webb article.
Look over here.
No.
We all, every, all millions of us, we're all, we have to look in the same direction and we only do the same thing at all times.
Never.
No.
Hey, you, come back.
I'm going to eat lunch.
No.
We will eat at the same time.
Like it's, it's nonsense.
It's just a fake argument.
It's a false dichotomy, which false dichotomy is one of the most common kind of fallacies and tricks That's in a lot of these fake controversies.
But I still know that I don't know until I confirm for myself, right?
But I'm certainly sympathetic to it because if it is true, this is terrible.
And then says to himself, you know, if I'm going to do this, I want to know what the real story is here.
And so?
So as fate would have it, he takes a job at NASA.
When he gets there, he goes into the office of some of his higher ups and he says, look, you know, what do we make of this?
I took it to the head of strategic communications and I said, hey, are you aware of this?
And they said, no.
Oh, my goodness.
Let's go talk to Gregory Robinson, who basically led the James Webb Space Telescope to completion.
He was concerned.
He's like, oh, this is not good.
Let's look into this.
And he said, Hakeem, please send me everything you have.
And so I sent him the two articles, I sent him the Wikipedia article, and that's all I could find up to that point.
So I had another meeting with him a week later, and he said, Hakeem, you know, this does not provide any actual evidence of what happened.
All I see here is accusations.
Would you mind looking into it and finding out what actually happened?
And I said, sure, I'd love to, right?
Because I had the exact same curiosity and I love the research.
So, you know, that sounds great.
So his story here struck me as a little weird.
Did it strike you as a little weird?
The way he took on the other side in a way that, to me, came across a little bit fake.
What about the kids coming up?
They're gonna have to see this.
By itself, not a huge deal.
But contrast that with what he says the sequencing of that was.
So that article is from June 2015.
And the way he tells it, it's like this group of people that he was all kind of in with, like, yeah, no, they're talking about it, makes sense.
They ask him, hey, Hakeem, can you join us?
Help us do, or something.
And it's not clear what that ask is.
I mean, there have been different petitions so they could have been like hey sign this petition and there have been I guess like efforts to be vocal about it could could have been that we don't know because he doesn't tell us but he says like no I can't do that because I haven't looked into it so he goes from like yeah this is oh this is so concerning plus think of the kids like literally think of the children and then people are like do you want to like do anything to help us with it oh I haven't looked into I don't know Which is like, okay, I guess.
And what you're expecting next, what I'm expecting next is, so I needed to research to get back to them, like that was Wednesday that they asked me.
And I'm like, hey, let me do some research and maybe, you know, a week, a month, whatever goes by.
And then I was like, hey, no, I don't believe this, which spoiler is what's going to happen.
But instead of that, he says, and then as luck would have it, I took a job at NASA and surfing his LinkedIn profile.
I see he joined NASA October 2016.
So almost the end of 2016.
So that is a year and four months later.
So didn't that come across as a little weird to you?
Oh yeah, I saw this problem.
Boy, what a big problem this is.
Think of the kids.
The people were like, hey, do you want to help us with this?
He says, eh, haven't looked into it, which is, that's already kind of weird.
And then instead of, then I looked into it.
So anyway, a year and four months later, cause apparently he just blew those people off.
He starts a job at NASA and he's so concerned though about this thing that he blew off.
Like he's like, I remember this from a year and four months ago.
Definitely.
I've been hanging on to this.
Not enough to research it, not enough to help the people who think it's a big deal, but I've just been hanging on to it.
And he gives us the impression that he starts at NASA and he's like, by golly, I need to clear this up right away.
And one more thing that might make you suspicious is he talks to somebody, then they talk to another person, and then they say, Hakeem, can you look into this?
And wouldn't you think, just even as a listener, even knowing nothing about this, wouldn't you think, well, that's a little weird.
Wouldn't NASA want to like hire a historian or like an expert or consultant?
I mean, I mean, who knows?
You know, federal agencies, government's kind of weird place.
Sometimes they're like, I don't know who would do whose job would this be?
But I don't know.
It still seems a little weird that they're like, well, why don't you go save us?
Even though it's not your job and you're not a historian, a trained historian at all.
So if like me, you were a little suspicious of this story at this point, turns out your suspicions are warranted.
Because further evidence tells us that this is a bullshit story.
So we'll talk about that when we get to it.
And according to Hakeem, they tell him, would you please take a look at it?
So what starts as a kind of personal curiosity about who James Webb really was and what he did is now becoming kind of official business from NASA.
Get to the bottom of this.
Yes.
At this point, it's Hakeem with certainly the help of NASA opening some doors and starting to really delve into the archives.
So once empowered to carry out this inquiry, what does Hakeem find?
Here's a little bit I can skip through.
He just talks about the Red Scare and then the Lavender Scare in general in historical terms.
And how James Webb was at the State Department at the time, etc, etc.
And then here they get to the allegations, quote-unquote, against James Webb.
And what specific evidence is put forward about Webb's role in this Lavender Scare?
Well, it's twofold.
One, there's this quote that he allegedly wrote in a government report, and it goes like this.
It is generally believed that those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.
As kind of a justification for forcing out gay workers.
Precisely.
The second is that Webb personally fired 91 gay employees from the State Department.
Serious claims.
Serious claims.
And if true, you can understand very much why people today would look at that with a sense of horror.
And what does Hakeem find about all this?
So he systematically goes about this.
Systematically.
Just peppering in little adjectives that I think tip off where you are.
He delves into the NASA archives, he delves into the congressional archives, and after reading every piece of information on Webb, he still can't find any evidence that Webb wrote this damning, bigoted quote.
So, that is Michael Powell, the reporter, representing that this guy he's talking to read literally every single thing about James Webb, like every piece of paper.
That's, I'm not, this time is not a Thomas exaggeration, that's what he said.
That's a pretty strong claim.
And again, it sets up his protagonist as the systematic guy went through everything, every piece of paper.
But eventually he does find the quote.
And this exact quote that was horrible that was put in his name appeared in a Senate report, not in James Webb's words.
Webb didn't write it.
It's actually from a report issued by the Senate that Webb had absolutely nothing to do with.
What about the second accusation that Webb fired gay employees?
It wasn't James Webb.
Put simply, he didn't do that.
So it was a case of mistaken identity.
That appeared to be the case to me.
Everything was done by John Purifoy and Carlisle Humilsine, who were two other employees at the State Department.
So what Hakeem has found is that the central allegations that first materialized in those articles he had read a few years earlier and drummed up all this anger at Webb, that those central allegations are basically not accurate.
That's correct.
And what's also particularly interesting is he finds in looking at Webb's tenure at NASA in the 1960s that Webb had played a key role in helping to racially integrate this massive agency.
particularly at its famed research facilities in Huntsville, Alabama.
The South.
The South.
And here it's very important to understand historical context.
George Wallace is the arch segregationist governor of Alabama, absolutely opposed to any idea of integrating federal agencies on his watch in Alabama, puts a lot of pressure on Webb and President Johnson not to do this.
And Webb says, no, we're going to integrate this agency.
He even at one point threatens to move key parts of that facility out of Alabama, which is a strong shot across the bow to Alabama.
Right.
And to its extremely prominent and powerful segregationist governor.
Right.
And in the end, George Wallace backed down.
So according to Hakeem's research, not only is Webb not a bigot, he is actively working to make the United States government more inclusive.
Yes.
Once I had those two things together, oh, I love Webb now.
And what does Hakeem do with this information that clearly undercuts everything that's being said in this moment about James Webb?
Notice the language there.
Undercuts everything that's being said.
In literally two slapdash articles, not by historians, that were written in 2015.
But this counters everything that is being said about James Webb.
Well, first, of course, he goes back and he tells NASA what he's found.
And then he writes an article in which he lays out at some length all of his findings.
And he's, you know, tough in that piece.
I mean, he says, look, there have been accusations made by essentially people within my community that is physicists, that he is a homophobe and it led this lavender purge.
And he's saying that's all wrong.
And in fact, his article was entitled, Was NASA's Historic Leader James Webb a Bigot?
So I want to ask you something.
Based on what you've heard and the dates that I said, when do you think he wrote this article?
I'm just curious.
When do you think Hakeem wrote this article?
We got a pretty streamlined story.
2015.
These articles are out.
Oh, big deal.
Hakeem really cares.
People ask him to help.
He's like, nah, not gonna look into it.
Gets a job at NASA.
Goes in.
He's like, hey, have you seen this?
They're like, oh no.
They set him on the task of researching.
Cool.
He researches.
He looks, reads every piece of paper, clarifies everything.
Bam!
Clears James Webb's name.
Again, for this first iteration, this first level of debunk, we're on debunk level one.
I'm going to take them at their word for the most part.
Then he writes this article.
So when would you guess we are?
And obviously, since I'm asking the question, I'm tipping you off.
But pretend I haven't tipped you off.
Let's just pretend like this is totally straightforward.
No tip off.
You're just thinking, okay, well, let's see.
It's 2016.
He started NASA, went in right away, demanded to look into this.
Okay, maybe.
So, you know, he's got a J job.
He's doing stuff.
Maybe that research took a minute.
I don't know.
Maybe it's 2017.
You know, like maybe it's mid-2017.
Maybe he got real busy and like, okay, maybe it's another year later.
This was written January 23rd, 2021.
That was five years.
So anyway, you might think I'm making a big deal about this.
Well, okay.
All right.
Maybe.
But these were things that seemed weird to me.
Maybe they weren't further investigation that I've already done.
Not for nothing.
The way he presents it of like, I went into NASA, approached them.
They're like, look into this.
I wonder what they said when it's been five years.
And he's like, hey boss, got the report for you.
And they're like, what?
I don't even remember.
This is, all of Trump happened in between when I apparently asked you this and when you're coming to me.
So literally, who are you?
I don't, I don't, have we met?
I don't know.
It seems a little weird.
Took a long time there, if that's how you're presenting the storyline.
And can you read me your conclusion?
In full disclosure, I have never met James Webb, who died in 1992.
I have no idea what was in his heart and mind.
But what I can say conclusively is that there is zero evidence that Webb is guilty of the allegations against him.
What I can say conclusively, mind you.
Conclusively.
is that there's zero evidence that Webb is guilty of the allegations.
A pretty expansive thing, a pretty bold claim to be just allowing to air on your podcast of record from the New York Times uncritically.
And he makes very clear no, no, and no.
He's very unequivocal about what he found.
When you hit publish on that essay, what did you expect?
Did you think there would be blowback?
I did not expect blowback.
Not at all.
I thought there would be a big sigh of relief from the astronomy community and we'd move forward.
And what was the initial reaction?
Well, the initial reaction was exactly that.
There was like immediately, you know, 400 or so astronomers quote tweeted that article with, hey, now we can move on.
It's not true.
But then a few days later, things changed drastically.
Wow, what an ominous cliffhanger.
Michael, what does Hakeem mean when he says that the initial reaction to his piece changes drastically?
At first, many physicists look at his article, look at the research, and there's a sense of relief.
Oh, okay, we don't have to worry about that.
We have not named this spectacular telescope after a homophobe.
Then the criticism comes, and it is aimed at Hakeem personally and at his historical research.
And one of my colleagues, who I had known since 2008, published an article with the title, "The Straits Are Here to Save Us," about me, and this article and this research, you know, and I'm just like, whoa!
The first element boils down to who are you, a straight male physicist, to tell us, queer, gay physicists and employees of NASA and other universities, what Webb was about?
Who were you to tell us our history?
This was where I threw my phone in the fucking ocean, except not really.
The first time I was listening to it, this is where I already knew.
Oh, okay.
The game is up.
Nevermind.
Here's the thing.
This is important because this is a symptom of the problem I am trying to fix with my very modest podcast here.
I found this part so fucking ins- I knew, without even looking, I prom- Scouts Honor!
Without even looking anything up yet, when I was first listening to this, I heard that little fucking exchange, and I said, oh, that's bullshit, because I have a lot of experience with social justice issues and progressive causes, and while certainly there are plenty of people within those movements who make shitty arguments, like that's- of course, like there's- and for any side of anything, especially issues where there's broadly two sides in the world, Like left and right, for example, or some of those broad issues.
You're gonna have people who argue terribly on either side.
And if you only point to those people and only answer their arguments, boy, you're really doing an intellectually dishonest thing.
But I'm listening to this and I'm thinking, okay, you are telling me that the response to Hakeem's article was, well, you shouldn't even do the research.
You can't even, you don't even know, because like that would already be admitting you don't have anything.
That would be a last ditch effort argument of someone who has absolutely no response.
And while you may find some screaming protester somewhere, some college student, as Fox News often does, as these anti-woke people often do, you may find one of them who would just say like, you can't do this because you're not gay.
And like, that's their whole argument?
You might find somebody like that to make that argument.
It's a stupid argument.
Nobody believes that argument.
Nobody on any side, except for maybe some really naive, shallow-thinking progressives or woke people, would think that.
But nobody serious thinks that the causal argument of, okay, you have the better data, but you're not part of my identity group, so doesn't count.
Nobody.
Nobody serious.
And we are talking about astrophysicists!
Like, it would be one thing if you were describing a college freshman debate.
Then I might believe you.
Then I might be like, oh yeah, I bet a college freshman might have said that.
Yeah, sure.
But you were going to have me believe, you were going to characterize the whole backlash, the counter to Hakeem, in that, whatever that blog post was that's called, the straights are coming to save us.
You were going to say that they just said, how dare you look into this?
Because you're not one of us.
You're gonna, you're gonna, with a straight face, you're gonna, you're gonna ask me to believe that a debate in which both sides are astrophysicists, I know that that's never true.
When we're talking about serious love, we're not talking about kids, not talking about shouting people on YouTube videos, whatever.
When we're talking about serious people, that's never true.
The argument never goes that way.
It doesn't.
But when your conception of the world has been badly affected, By this propaganda, that's what I'm trying to fight with this podcast.
By the constant barrage of, oh yeah, you know those screaming people, they're always like, ah, straight white men, you can't do anything.
Like, you've heard that a million times.
And obviously, Hakeem is a black man.
I'm just using the typical, like, how that goes.
You have heard time after time and after time after time after time, bad faith people represent The woke quote-unquote argument says that.
You've heard that a million times.
Oh, you're not allowed to look at it because you're not our identity group.
That never is the case.
But I know that because I haven't been bombarded with years upon years of misinformation about progressives and what they believe and how they argue.
But this reporter apparently, and I guess Michael Barbaro has, Or is being like they're being instructed to or something by Mr. New York Times.
I don't know.
And importantly, this is exactly the kind of thing that broadly America is susceptible to.
I think if you polled the entire U.S.
population and told them, hey, if you look at the progressive side, do they often tell you like you're just wrong because you're a white man or whatever?
And then and like you get like 70 percent of people being like, yeah, that's all they do.
They're just like, ah, white man, you're wrong.
And that's never what it is at a serious level.
If you're going to entertain the best arguments of the other side or even like the average arguments of the other side, that's never what's happening.
This is basically a criticism that Hakeem is not qualified as a non-gay, non-queer person to even carry out this inquiry.
Yes, not qualified by dint of his identity.
The most annoying fucking part of that obviously bad faith representation of the other side is you're setting up an obvious straw man and then like faux treating it.
It's like if I said, yeah, the other side's argument, they're just like, you're wrong because you're fucking wearing a blue hat.
And then Michael Barbaro is like, oh, OK, so this would be a criticism that people with blue hats.
Who are you to tell us our history?
Because you're wearing a blue hat.
Oh, OK.
Hmm.
Taking that argument very seriously.
Well, make sure to set it up.
And with a tone like I'm respecting that fake argument I just made up.
OK.
Hmm.
Yeah.
It's so condescending.
And I'm just like, whoa.
First off, I thought we had a cordial working relationship.
Why?
You know, why are you dissing me like this personally?
Wow, so now we're just listening to one side of a Twitter feud.
Hi, we're the New York Times.
Do you want to hear us air one side of a personal disagreement over Twitter as our news?
That's our news now.
This is not an opinion piece, this is news.
Do we do a good news if I just play uncritically some guy giving his side of a Twitter fight?
What Olashile didn't tell you about his blog post, that is the focus of this, is that he was actually the one who was proactively a piece of shit toward colleagues.
So in the 2015 piece by Matthew Francis, that's the one that's like, it's just a short little thing, couple paragraphs, not a, not really.
I mean, it really is like five paragraphs.
He credits Prescott Weinstein as the one who quote, first informed me of his anti-gay activities, unquote, obviously being James Webb.
So then, Oluseyi, in his triumphant conclusion, where he's gonna like name names as to who got this all wrong, he says, quote, The author of the Forbes.com article references a professional astrophysicist as his original source for learning of the allegations against Webb.
This scientist propagated unsubstantiated false information as if it were true, without performing proper scientific rigor to investigate its veracity.
I don't know, did you perform proper scientific rigor to determine if this insult is really justified?
Because, like, there's a lot of ways that this would be a fucking really unfair attack on a colleague.
Prescott Weinstein could have just offhandedly mentioned one day to Matthew Francis, Hey, I read this article that said James Webb, you know, was a homophobe.
Look at this.
Like, that could have been it.
It's completely fucking disingenuous to pretend that astrophysicists have a sacred duty, a scientific obligation to fact check every single, like, fucking article they ever see before sharing it with a friend.
That's not how humans work.
It's incredibly misleading and just brazen to just pick out not only the piece by Matthew Francis, But to also say that author said that a professional astrophysicist was the original source for learning of this.
That scientist propagated unsubstanti- Shut the fuck up, man.
Clearly there's something personal going on there.
Now, mind you, the author of The Straits Are Here to Save Us is not Prescott Weinstein.
But the next paragraph reads, again, it's like he's listing off these grievances toward the end.
Like, I'm just gonna go ahead and say it.
astrophysicists in the online social media group who blindly accepted the allegations also piled on and were ready to confront NASA, although they did not apply proper rigor.
Like, I'm just going to go ahead and say it.
I'm not, I guess, a scientist, but I actually think it's okay to trust Wikipedia for this level of inquiry.
Like, at the level of... Hey, I think this guy, like, kind of sucked.
Oh yeah, that guy did kind of suck.
That's fucking fine.
Like, we're not all historians who have access to... By the way, yeah, part of his investigation involves him being at NASA and having access to all this shit.
And going through every word we're to believe.
And now he's like scolding other scientists who took on board a Wikipedia article and that had citations to books and etc.
Most of which are still completely valid.
Admittedly, that quote might be misattributed, but yeah, okay, there's a lot else there though.
That kind of lecturing is obviously personal, in my opinion.
It just is.
Look, there's nothing wrong with doing this research and uncovering that quote shouldn't be attributed to James Webb and also, well, the other stuff is a little fuzzy, but yeah, okay, maybe some other possible mistaken identity.
We'll get to it in later episodes.
Nothing wrong with doing that research.
This idea that at the end of that blog post you're gonna list, like it's the fucking witch trials, everybody who didn't stand up to your proper scientific rigor standards for not doing something, by the way, that seems as though they couldn't have done based on the resources you had that they didn't have.
And then, He has the temerity to be like, Whoa, I thought we were colleagues and say, I figured once I wrote this, everyone would be like, Hey, you're a hero.
We're all happy now.
Like, no, you didn't.
You didn't think that you would write this and everything would be great.
If you put those last two paragraphs in chastising an entire community of, let me read that again.
Quote, the community of astronomers and astrophysicists in the online social media group who blindly accepted the allegations also piled on and were ready to confront NASA, even though they did not apply proper rigor.
Come on.
Are you kidding me?
That is unbelievable.
But we only hear him because he's the one on the fucking New York Times, The Daily Podcast.
And he gets to say, well, where's this hostility coming from, people?
And what about the historical critique?
Because from everything you've said, his research is pretty clear cut and it's pretty compelling.
Well, they say that my research changes nothing.
All I did was look at a quote and who actually said it, but that was it, right?
Well, critics say he missed a few things, including something that happened in the early 1960s when Webb was chief administrator at NASA.
A gay employee at NASA was caught in a sting by police in Washington, D.C.
and was later fired by NASA.
And the accusation was that Webb should have known about this, could have known about this, and should have stopped it.
Because he ran.
Because he ran NASA.
So from what you just heard, I want to know, and again, obviously I'm seeding this for you, but pretend I haven't said anything.
You heard him reference the blog, The Straits Are Here To Save Us.
And you heard him characterize that and take very seriously the argument, ah, that's because you are not qualified.
And then they transition to like, OK, what are the historical arguments?
Well, critics say they missed a few things.
I want to know something.
Give me your view just as a listener to The Daily.
Pretend I'm not here.
What do you think is the content of that blog, The Straits Are Here To Save Us?
Like, what do you—based on their representation of it, again, because this is all about how well, how accurately are the New York Times reporting facts?
And what impressions are they leaving their readers, their listeners, are they leaving you with an accurate idea of different factual components of the story?
What do you think, based on that description, the straights are here to save us, what do you think that says?
Well, I would say, if I was just listening to it and I was taking them at their word, I would think it's like, okay, the straights are here to save us.
It sounds like it's a personal attack where they're like, okay, fuck this guy.
He's not queer.
He has no business looking into this.
Fuck you.
I can't believe you did this to us.
You're not qualified because of your identity and no other reason.
He doesn't even throw in historian there, by the way.
He could have at least thrown in historian to like, Kind of make it plausibly the counter-argument?
That's what I would think that blog says.
I would think it's about, I don't know, four paragraphs.
It's probably like, fuck this guy.
How dare you do this?
You're not qualified to do this because you're not gay.
I don't care what any of your facts say.
Take your article and shove it.
That's basically what I would be left with the impression of.
And then they would transition to, well, okay, here's what some critics say, and there's some history involved.
Would it surprise you to learn, then, that the Straits are Here to Save Us on the Not-Not-Rocket-Science sub-stack, which is a great name, by Lucien Wachowicz, is pretty long and comprehensive.
I don't know, 20 paragraphs just by eyeballing it, and involves citations to historians, citations to PhDs who actually know what the fuck they're talking about, a bunch of historical points to be made, And then also, of course, includes in the beginning this sentence, I'm extremely tired of straight people incorrectly explaining gay history to me for the purpose of justifying their own ends and because the scrubbing of Webb's historical record does active harm to LGBTQIA plus astronomers in the field today.
Would you have gotten that impression?
That actually what this blog post is, what this sub stack is, is here's a very detailed rebuttal of Olache's points.
Citing historians.
And furthermore, I'm very sick of straight people incorrectly explaining gay history to me.
Boy, that sure seems a lot different than... What's their argument?
Oh, well, you see, their argument is how dare you, a straight man, look into this.
Really?
That's it?
That's their whole argument?
That's... really?
I can't emphasize enough how instantly I knew this was fucking bullshit.
Because I know that's never what the argument is.
It never is.
I can't resist doing a bit of an analogy here, but this seems to be a sticking point, probably not for you listeners, but maybe.
Let's imagine the world is different and, you know, it's a matriarchy.
Women kind of run everything, let's imagine.
Just kind of role reversal, just for fun.
And let's pretend that often women just kick men in the nuts.
Just happens frequently.
And as a man, you're like, boy, that really fucking hurts.
That really hurts when I get kicked in the balls.
That is just unpleasant.
I do not like it.
It's painful.
It's incredibly painful.
And then what happens is like time after time, a bunch of women, by the way, you said that in your blog.
You're like, God, it's really painful.
I get kicked in the balls.
It hurts a lot.
And like, nobody seems to care about this.
And that's just a little blog that happens.
And then five books come out and several main network TV interviews and the New York Times headlines are a woman saying, actually, it doesn't hurt when they get kicked in the balls.
It's they like they kind of pretend it does, but it doesn't hurt.
It's actually completely painless.
And then that happens for, I don't know, centuries.
And eventually you're like, holy fucking shit.
Imagine men, because this is honestly, this is like often white men are who needs to be convinced of these things.
Now imagine in response to that, this man goes to their blog and says, God, I am so fucking sick of women telling me that it doesn't hurt when I get kicked in the nuts.
Like, why are women telling me how that feels?
Can you stop doing that?
You don't know how it feels.
And then, ooh, guess what?
Then you get the second wave of New York Times headlines.
By the way, all the while, you're having to write in your little blog because you're not empowered.
And that's just how it works.
And then all the responses are usually in way more privileged, powerful sources like books and TV and New York Times.
And then the women respond.
Their arguments are terrible.
Here they are saying, I, as a woman, cannot know if it hurts when they get kicked in the balls.
And that is just logically not sound.
Look, lots of things have never happened to me.
I could tell you whether they hurt or don't hurt.
I've never got my arm chopped off.
I could tell you that hurts.
Many of my best friends are men, and they tell me that it doesn't hurt when you get kicked in the balls.
And this person is out there just telling me, because I'm a woman, I can't know, there's no way for me to know that it doesn't hurt when you get kicked in the balls.
Well, they just don't have an argument.
I have all my sources, I have the facts on my side.
And these men over here, all they can, all they're left with, I have no argument, all they're left with is, uh, how dare you, a woman, chime in on this.
It's identity politics and it's a sign of people who have no argument.
That's essentially a perfect description in my mind of the dynamics that go on day after day after day after day with exactly these kinds of issues.
That's what it is.
And so when somebody So I'll step out of my weird analogy, apologies, but I couldn't help it.
It's a perfect, I'm sorry, it's a perfect distillation of what's happening.
Just imagine though, that every time you hear this, they're saying, Oh my God, I'm so sick.
Yeah.
I'm so sick of people who don't know that aren't a part of this.
They don't, they don't, they're telling me who is a part of this about my own history, about my own pain, about my, I'm just sick of that.
That's what they're doing.
They're not saying, therefore you are wrong, and therefore I ignore your evidence, and yet, like, they set it up as though, well, yeah, okay, Oluseyi has perfect evidence, obviously, but like, forget that, like, he's not gay, so I'm not gonna listen.
And it is downright journalistically fucking irresponsible to summarize this sub stack that way.
I mean, come on.
Look, it's not a dissertation, but it's it's a well-written, pretty long sub stack with references to history, and the top line of it is, boy, this guy is fucking wrong, and I'm tired of people like this coming in and telling me stuff they don't know anything about.
Unreal.
So now I want to track the flow of argument, how Barbaro And Powell and Oluseyi have traced it for you.
Now they are saying, well the pushback to Oluseyi's article is James Webb was the head of NASA when this guy was fired who was gay for being gay and he should have known or he should have stopped it or something like that.
Now that's that's their summary of where this went next.
Like that's a new attack.
According to what you've been told.
And now we'll go down the road of that argument.
And what does Hakeem say about that?
Hakeem points out several things.
One is there's no particular reason to think that Webb would have known about this.
This was not a top employee at NASA.
NASA is a very large federal agency.
But even more to the point... The head of federal agencies take directions from above.
There was an executive order signed by President Eisenhower, and that was enforced for the next 20 years, saying that openly gay Americans could not work for the federal government.
It was not a NASA policy.
It was a federal, government-wide policy that applied to every federal agency.
It was wrong-minded.
It was wrong-minded.
A hundred percent, it was wrong, and there are bad actors, and we know their names, and James Webb is not among them.
So the relevant context is that Webb may or may not have known about this firing, there's no evidence he played a role in it, and that the firing more or less followed the law of the land.
Yes, he would have literally had to disobey a executive order by the President of the United States.
I have so much to say about this in part two when we dig into the actual case he's talking about and the evidence, but let it suffice to say for now that already, just having listened to this the first time, I'm very certain this is another false dichotomy.
Either you fire everyone who's gay or you violate a federal law.
Well, I've worked in government.
There's a lot you could do.
Paperwork gets lost.
You disagree?
No, I don't think they're gay, actually.
I don't think they are.
I talked to him, I don't think he's gay.
There's plenty, plenty you could do.
And furthermore, I really want to note something.
Now in this argument, note that Oluseyi is saying, ah, he wouldn't have known.
Director wouldn't have known.
No evidence he knew.
Wouldn't have known.
Well, that's a far cry from I'm 100% fucking certain that everything, every accusation against him is false.
Now we're in the territory of, at best, There's not evidence.
Short of uncovering a document that says, I have confirmed, I do hereby confirm that James Webb does not know about what I'm doing right now, what you're finding is just not evidence.
So it could be.
He could have had his hand in this and there's just no memos that survived or that were written down.
You know, who knows what percentage chance that is, but it's not zero.
Probably pretty significant.
This is a long time ago.
Who knows?
So I just want to note, like, there's definitely some uncertainty there, even just taking this podcast at its word.
Let's continue.
They didn't admit that he didn't do what he was accused of.
They just said, oh, what Hakeem does not understand is that Webb was complicit because he was in management.
And this gets to this broader critique of Hakeem's work, that James Webb had a responsibility at various places, both when he was at the State Department and when he was at NASA, to speak up for gay rights and to speak up for gay Americans, and that if he failed to do so, he had failed morally, that he had failed in his moral obligation to history.
Okay, wait, really?
I mean, again, I kind of doubt that they would be saying he had an obligation in the 50s to stand up for gay rights, like wear a fucking pride flag.
I would be surprised if they're making that claim.
Just again, on first listen, I would imagine they would make the claim like, well, no, he should have found a way to not do this evil thing.
Like he should, he could have easily found a way to fudge it or to not, or to like, you know, protect people.
But I kind of doubt now that this podcast has turned me incredibly skeptical with some of the terrible reasoning it's already shown.
I kind of doubt that they would have said, yes, he had to stand up for gay people.
Like that's not, it just strikes me as making a stronger claim than I would, than I bet these people are making.
Hmm, so this is intriguing.
This criticism of Hakeem's research is that whether or not Webb himself did any of the things he'd been accused of doing, which Hakeem has found he didn't, the fact that as a leader he didn't do more to stop it makes him worthy of condemnation.
Yes, precisely.
Alright, first off, note again, the paper of record, it's being reported as fact That, yeah, Hakeem found he didn't do any of the things he's being accused of.
That's just, he just says, again, when it's Trump on a tape saying, I know this is illegal, the guy's like, well, I don't, okay, I don't want to say.
That he knew it was illegal, but like, I mean, prosecutors would probably say that.
Think about how much hedging there is in that.
But here we have, we have not heard from the other side.
We have no idea what the fucking entire list of arguments from the other side is.
We have no real idea what Hakim researched and the nature, and he's not a trained historian.
We don't have any word of like, did he do a perfect job?
And this is Michael Barbaro just saying, like in parentheses, Olashe has found he didn't.
It's not Olashe argues he didn't.
It's not Olashe contends or thinks or whatever.
It's, no, Olashe has found that he didn't do these things.
And then once again, we get the most condescending, annoying fucking thing in the world, where we set up a straw man argument, but with an incredibly fake seriousness.
You've set that up all seriously.
It must be a very serious, accurate representation of the other side.
There's a word in historiography, presentism, which is this idea that one can apply the moral lens of our current day to past events.
I mean, it's raised around our civil war, it's raised around any kind of really urgent, certainly the civil rights movement.
In this case, it would be applied to James Webb and saying, look, in 1949, 1950, when you're at the State Department and gay employees or potentially gay employees, because no one quite knows who they are, are coming under attack, that you should have understood this as a moral civil rights issue and stood up and said something and resign if you needed to.
Okay, this is where I have to just remind everyone what the fuck we're talking about here, because this is fucking insane.
Lest we all forget, we are talking about the naming of a fucking telescope!
I imagine that's gotten lost somewhere here for some of you.
We are talking about, and you know what's never mentioned in this show?
How did they decide to name it the James Webb Space Telescope?
Is that normal to be named after an administrator?
What are other things named after that are big, important science thingies?
How was that process?
How did that go?
Who decided that?
When?
When was it decided?
Correct me if I'm wrong, I don't hear any of that.
And the reason I bring it up now is, once again, I guarantee you this is not an accurate fucking representation without even knowing, without even looking it up.
This can't be an accurate representation of the other side.
Because I know that if someone has decided to name an incredible space telescope, like one of the biggest feats of science in ever, and someone has decided to name it after somebody who was, you know, quite possibly a piece of shit, that really the argument is going to be like, we only have one of these fucking telescopes.
Like if it's a close call, if it's even anywhere in the realm of like, Yeah, he might have been responsible for firing people for being gay.
Why don't we just find someone better?
What we're talking about is naming one thing after a person.
There are, I don't know if you know this, a lot of people.
And there have been a lot of really cool people through history.
And again, just if you would ask me on the street before any of this, who should we revere by naming very, very important things after them?
Like things that are like super Unique, there's only one of them or two of them, a handful of them in a century.
Who should we reserve that to?
I'd say, well, that better be someone really fucking amazing.
You know, that better be somebody who's done something really significant in many ways.
We're talking a science thing.
Okay, well, I would think that could be like an amazing scientist, by the way.
I don't know, someone who discovered something fucking incredible, like altering the course of science discoveries, maybe.
That would be one thing.
Or, I don't know, NASA has kind of a checkered history and obviously the country has kind of a checkered history.
I do know there was a movie recently about some black women who just, like, were amazing but were kept out of ever rising very far and were, you know, were in segregation, all that stuff.
I bet there's going to be a lot of those hidden figures throughout NASA history.
Maybe there's somebody who was marginalized by NASA back in the day.
It would be cool to honor them.
Just because like hey we're trying to undo some of the sins of the past here because this person was trampled over at the time and it's really unfair like they should have had a much better career they should have been you know like I bet you there's a billion of those or even if it's a science thingy it's You know, it's a humanity thingy.
This is something that, and I think they said this, this data is going to be used everywhere.
And it's going to be in every, you know, paper, in every journal.
They'll be citing the James Webb Space Center.
This is a worldwide thing, essentially.
I know it's ours.
It's mine.
It's America.
America's USA.
USA!
Look, I know it's the United States that's launching the mission and all that, but like, I could see picking, I don't know, a universally beloved historical figure or something.
I know those are somewhat rare, but somebody inspiring, somebody Who at the very least did something so good that even if their character wasn't amazing in all respects, it doesn't really matter.
Like that's, we get people are human.
I understand.
There's no saints who literally never did a wrong thing, but there's plenty of people in history who you'd be like, yeah, this, this person stood up for a very important thing at this time when no one else was, you know, things, real accomplishments that were hard to do.
And now we get this burden flipping that no one has acknowledged at all where no, no, you would need to prove That he was over and above the bigotry of the time period.
Like if he's just par for the course, like if he's just normal amount of bigotry following orders...
That is fine.
He gets the telescope because he's bought it.
He has the rights to it or something.
I don't know why.
Again, you could just change the name.
Here's a question for a part two.
Have NASA ever had to change the name of anything?
Has that ever happened?
How did that go?
Was it hard?
Did it matter?
Those are questions that I think would be pretty good context for a New York Times reporting piece on this.
But I guess we'll have to rely on some podcaster to cover it.
But think about that burden flipping.
And therefore, so I'm betting just as a listener here, That what they're probably saying, now that I know, by the way, I know from a few minutes ago that there's no fucking way Barbaro and Powell are accurately representing the other side's arguments.
I just know that, just not having looked anything up, I know that from them saying the counter argument was you can't do this because you're straight.
There's no way that's real.
So this has tipped me off that there might be more bad faith.
And so if I had to guess at this point, I would say, well, maybe they're saying like, look, we're revering Who we choose to give this great honor, this huge, massive honor had better be pretty great.
And they'd better be, it'd been some like, yeah, maybe if James Webb had been a civil rights icon and had like fought against firing gay people and personally saved the careers of some gay people.
Well, that'd be fucking great.
Yeah.
All right.
That'd be cool.
Like that's how I'm imagining now that I know Barbaro and Powell are full of shit on this.
That's, that's what I'm imagining probably happened here.
Now listen to this part.
This is, oh my, just listen to this.
Let me give you an example.
There's a professor at the University of New Hampshire, Dr. Chanda Prescott Weinstein, a well-known physicist.
By the way, is she impressive?
A frankly very impressive person?
What's her background?
Does she come from a hardscrabble upbringing?
Was it amazing that she even became a... Oh no, we don't know anything about her and you barely told us anything?
Okay, yeah.
She's been very critical of Hakeem and she argues that James Webb, in fact, had a choice.
That, as she wrote, he could have been a radical freedom fighter and simply refused to serve in the Truman administration.
So this is where I have to chime in with some of the research I've done.
This is a bit of a spoiling of part two, but I cannot help it because this is fucking journalistic malpractice.
You've just been led to believe that after being disproven at every turn, now Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, he names her, by the way, Chanda is agender, but uses she her pronouns from everything I'm seeing online.
And the way he characterizes Prescott Weinstein's argument is like she's followed along this whole time as Oluseyi has just dropped knowledge on her and she's like, well, okay, let me think.
What now?
Let me see if I can shift these goalposts.
Well, he could have resigned to be a freedom fighter.
Again, this is a reporter, the same level of reporter who refused to say that Trump knew what he was doing was illegal, even though he's caught on tape saying he knew what he was doing is illegal.
And they are leading us to believe that this person, Prescott Weinstein, is just constantly burden shifting to the point where now she's asserting that, no, he could have been a freedom, radical freedom fighter.
As though she thinks that people back then would have to see the future.
It's just set up like this person's an idiot.
And because this is set up that way, it is so egregious how this is set up.
I had, like, one of the first things I researched in this Was like, okay, did she really say that?
Because that, like, that would be, again, it would be one of those times where it's like, oh, it looks like a woke person I agree with on everything is making a terrible argument.
Like, I'm, and I'm always ready to say that, by the way.
It doesn't threaten my worldview to say, oh, looks like that one person on the progressive side made a shit argument in that instance.
I have no problem with saying, that's fine.
I could call that out all day.
So I was curious.
I was like, well, I know this person.
They're, they're an astrophysicist.
They're very smart.
That would seem like a weird, transparently goalpost shifting argument to make.
So I had to check how he substantiates that.
And fortunately, it's in his New York Times article.
Because this podcast episode from, again, May, is actually based on an article that was written in December 2022.
So for some reason, I don't know if they just needed content that day, they take a five month old story about an even older story, and they're like, let's put this up on the main podcast, the flagship fucking podcast of record.
And fortunately, I can refer to that article And I can track down how he's making this claim.
And check this out.
We're presented that she's responding, well, he could have resigned.
And they specifically are using that as evidence of goalpost shifting.
You better be very accurate.
You are the one holding the megaphone.
You are not interviewing, at least on the podcast, the other side at all.
You are only representing their arguments, and you are the New York fucking Times.
If you are going to introduce them as having set up a very obvious strawman-golpo-shifting-shit argument that anyone can see from a mile away is shit, despite you're doing the faux-serious tone about, oh, yes, oh, I'm intriguing, but, no.
We all, that's transparent.
That obviously was a bad argument the whole time.
Boy, you had better be really fucking accurate if you're gonna do that.
Right?
If you're a New York Times report and you're the one giving the other side's arguments and you are saying, yes, this was a clear goalpost shift, it better be clear as fucking day.
Otherwise, that is so intellectually dishonest, journalistically dishonest.
Here's all I can find in the article.
Dr. Prescott Weinstein wrote, and that's hyperlinked, that if Mr. Webb had been a radical freedom fighter, he would not have served in the Truman administration.
Already, that's a very different statement.
That's someone saying, well, if he had been a radical freedom fighter, he would not have served in the Truman administration.
That's not someone saying, oh, yeah, here's what he should have done back then.
He should have resigned to be a radical freedom fighter.
That's a very different statement, don't you think?
And so I click on the blue text there to click on the hyperlink, and it links to a tweet.
And the tweet, which is part of a very long chain says, "The desire to exonerate a dead white guy who was in the thick of federal governance during the McCarthy era should give you all pause.
Like seriously, if he had been a radical freedom fighter, he wouldn't have been in the Truman administration.
Learn some history." Boy, that seems a lot different from how he's characterizing it.
Again, he has very much characterized it as this is yet another step in the goalpost moving.
Well, he could have resigned and given up his whole career.
That's what he could have done.
Well, I'm reading the tweet, which is the only proof anywhere of this summarization of Chanda's argument.
And what I see is someone saying, you keep trying to prove this guy was some radical freedom fighter.
For example, when Oluseyi was saying he was amazing in the 60s when he fought the desegregation.
And she seems to be responding to that kind of attempt to clean up or launder this guy's reputation.
And she's pointing out, like, I doubt that he was a radical freedom fighter because he wouldn't have been in this administration.
Like, picture it's 50 years from now, and we're arguing over, I don't know, something Betsy DeVos did.
Or you could pick a less charged example, maybe like Rex Tillerson or something, somebody where, I don't know.
And one side's like, no, he was actually great, look at this.
And someone's like, look, if he was a radical freedom fighter, he wouldn't have been in the fucking Trump administration.
Like, he never would have been there.
He wouldn't have been somebody Trump picked.
That's what she's saying.
You could disagree with that.
But to summarize it as, oh, yeah, well, he could resign.
That's what he could have done.
That's not even fucking close.
That's not even close, especially if you're setting up this obvious straw man shit argument and assigning it to her and saying, look at how bad this shit argument is.
That is so irresponsible.
So how should we think about an argument like that?
Translation, how should we think about this completely obviously shit argument that we just assigned to someone who isn't here to defend themselves?
How should we think about that shit argument we just made up?
Well, the problem is that if you talk to historians, including some very prominent gay historians who've studied this period, I mean, there was not a gay rights movement at that time.
Folks, I know I'm a broken record at this point, but this is the New York fucking Times.
And they're really going to let someone get on their flagship podcast and say there was no gay rights movement at that time?
I mean, okay, applying a lot of charity, maybe you could say there was no mainstream gay rights movement that, like, this normie would have known about, I guess?
Maybe?
But come on.
I mean, gay people have been around, let me check my historical notes, forever.
Obviously.
I feel like, again, there's so much of this podcast I didn't even have to do research.
Now, I did, of course, but, like, so much of it, just think about it for a second and be like, that can't be right.
Could that be right?
Could there really have been no gay rights movement?
You might feel like I'm nitpicking, but come on.
I wouldn't, on my podcast, let me say, well there was no gay rights movement.
I might say, the gay rights movement was lesser known at this point.
Hedge a little.
Presentism, in this sort of a case, is seen as asking people to anticipate where history is moving.
in a way that is simply kind of beyond their kin at that time.
In 1949, 1950, to have expected essentially someone to intuit that there would be a gay rights movement that would arise in the next two and three and four decades and come to flower is not reasonable.
That is their argument.
To take a minor thing, isn't it weird how when he said, you couldn't expect someone in 1949 or 1950 to anticipate the gay rights movement.
Well, wait a minute.
I thought we had already shifted to in the 60s when a gay man got fired.
Hadn't we already shifted?
Oh, isn't it a little convenient that when you want to make this point about how no one could have known, you pick the furthest back year that we're talking about when he was at the State Department and not when he was at NASA, the thing we're now talking about.
That's a little convenient.
Michael, no matter what intellectual framework you subscribe to when it comes to James Webb, It feels like what has happened in the case of Hakeem's research is that an original critique has been transformed and changed.
And in a sense, the goalposts have moved.
First, the accusation was that he did something very wrong.
That was disproven.
That was disproven.
Just says it.
Totally just asserts it.
So we're to believe that's fact.
And so the critique transforms into he was complicit.
So how does Hakeem start to think about that?
I mean, Hakeem finds himself.
Frustrated, frankly, at this shifting of the argument from one thing to the next to the next.
They started with, he initiated it.
He's a homophobe.
Then they pull back to he's complicit.
Then they get a hint of something.
It's never quite clear where this ends.
And at some point, Hakeem, a scientist, a man who loves to research.
What are the other people?
What's the other side?
Do they like research?
Are they scientists?
I want to just put back fresh in your mind, the guy refusing to say that Trump knew something was illegal.
Well, I don't want to speculate on it.
And just contrast this with what you're about to hear.
Hakeem, a scientist, a man who loves to research, starts to realize, you know, facts are probably not going to be the end of this.
You know, there's not going to be one finding, one set of facts that is going to put this to rest.
So sometimes the truth of the data is so obvious, but because of politics or some other reason, people will claim that they don't see what is obvious.
Are you kidding me?
They are just reporting as fact.
So Oluseyi, the scientist who likes to research, he has found that they're just not gonna, they're just going, no, no, no, no, not listening, not listening.
And like, facts aren't gonna work.
Like, they're not receptive to facts.
You're just reporting that the other side is not receptive to facts.
Literally.
I'm not exaggerating.
They go on.
This is being reported.
This isn't anyone's opinion.
It's not Oluseyi thinks this.
Or Oluseyi, I mean, you know, he's frustrated and so he feels as if There's not, no.
Starts to realize, you know, facts are probably not going to be the end of this.
You know, there's not going to be one finding, one set of facts that is going to put this to rest.
He starts to realize.
Not, he starts to like feel, just kind of emotionally feeling like, ah, there's nothing I can do.
He starts to realize.
So sometimes the truth of the data is so obvious, but because of politics or some other reason, people will claim that they don't see what is obvious.
Wow!
Boy, you better be really sure you're reporting that accurately.
If you're the New York Times, and you're not an opinion person, and you are reporting, you are letting this guy spout off, and you are agreeing with and endorsing, yeah, so the other side is just a bunch of assholes that, like, won't listen to facts.
Well, on one side, we have this researcher dedicated to knowledge, truth and knowledge.
And the other side, they just like won't even listen.
Like they don't, it doesn't matter.
For one, the issue settled as I'm reporting to you as a reporter for the New York Times.
Don't know if I mentioned that.
The issue is settled and the other side doesn't care.
They just don't care about facts.
Holy shit.
You would bet.
Have they ever said that about Republicans?
Seriously?
I mean, maybe, but like how often in the Trump era Did they get up here and say, yeah, you know, they just believe this wrong thing that's definitely wrong and you can't convince them otherwise.
I strongly doubt they made anywhere near as strong a claim.
And that claim would have been true.
They could have said, I think they should have said that.
Yeah, these people believe a wrong thing and they're wrong and they're not open to changing their minds.
That's actually true.
I actually don't have a problem with reporting that if it's fucking true.
But it was true about Trump supporters, and I highly doubt they ever used that strong a language.
It's not true here, spoilers, at all.
And they're just reporting it without even hearing from the other side.
At least they had the decency to interview a coal miner or two back in the Trump era.
We don't even hear from them.
And we're just being told they're closed to facts.
They're immune to it.
You can't even, you can't reason with these fuckers.
There's no, it's impossible.
They're idiots.
We're just being told that by a reporter!
It's unbelievable!
And that's why this episode feels very relevant to our current cultural moment.
And there is, I think indisputably, a growing tendency by progressive forces in our culture to revisit the past with disapproving eyes.
It often comes from a place of justifiable anger over a historical wrong, but at times it can seem uninterested and pretty unforgiving.
of the values that existed in the past, and it can be dismissive of the facts and the nuances that don't conform to the ultimate judgments of those who disapprove of it.
Does that feel right?
Yes.
I see this all the time in my writing and reporting.
Holy fucking...
What?!
Jesus Christ!
Once again, when does this come up?
Does this come up because there's a death squad that's like taking descendants of complicated figures in history and saying, we would like to execute these people?
Because of what their ancestors did.
And no, I don't care that that was the mores of the times.
We're doing it anyway.
Is that the context?
Or is the context, hey, there's a fucking statue honoring a horrible person.
Let's take that shit down.
Because those are very different things.
Very different things.
And the way you would approach those are very different.
If you're in a discussion of history, in a history class, and you're like, yeah, well, what do you think about the choices this person made?
Well, I don't know.
Back then, you know, the times they believe this and they thought this and it's complicated, blah, blah, blah.
Okay, you could have difference in opinion on that.
These people are perfectly capable of recognizing the framing of history and like what was going on back then.
But what they're usually doing in every case that I've ever heard of of this, Is saying, hey, can we not name this holiday after a genocidal maniac?
Can we not name this fucking monument after that?
Can we not put up a statue of this guy because they sucked?
And that's a very different standard.
God, I cannot believe the bad faith in how they've set up progressive people or woke people who are really fucking tired of slave owners having statues.
You don't have to make statues.
You don't learn history from statues.
Didn't we figure this out back when we went through this?
Like, I don't know, three, four years ago, whatever it was?
Like, all these arguments were made.
We know all these.
Yeah.
People were like, oh, you're going to forget your history.
No, you don't go.
That's not.
These are monuments.
These are things that honored them.
That's not history.
They're still in the history books.
A museum could have their things, their papers, their books.
You don't need a statue honoring them, a plaque saying, look at this fucking guy.
He's great.
That's a very different thing.
And no, if we're talking about naming the most important scientific endeavor in a century after someone, yeah, I'm not going to be very tolerant of arguments of, well, you have to understand at the time they all hated gay people and wanted them to die.
Okay, then let's not name it from anyone from that time.
Sounds like that time fucking sucked.
Let's pick someone from, I don't know, any other time, or pick someone who didn't go for the horrible mores of the time.
There are plenty of people who are anti-slavery during slavery.
If you're going to honor someone, you can find those people and be like, all right, let's put their name on it because they were... Think of how awesome it was to be ahead of your time on that.
That's an achievement worth honoring.
That's the framework in which we're looking at this.
Not some like, they all got together one day to judge historical figures and were like, nah, fuck that guy.
What?
He kind of was just going along with what was happening at the...
Nah, fuck him.
He should have known better.
Nobody's doing that.
Like, what?
And in talking with Hakeem, I mean, he confronted, in a sense, the conundrum, right?
I mean, on the one hand, it's enormously frustrating to see facts ignored or perhaps shunned.
On the other hand, as he talks about himself, he gets it.
He gets this sense of pain and aggrievement as you look back at history and try to make sense of history.
So fucking condescending.
On the other hand, he gets why these assholes are wrong and won't listen to facts.
He empathizes with it.
Really?
Or is it that he's not listening to what they're actually saying and they have better facts and he's not listening?
Could that be it?
I'm just, that's a possibility.
We don't know because it's not reported on here.
You know, when I first saw this, I thought about what if it was me?
What if I lived in my town and there was this confederate statue, but this dude, not only was he confederate, he was like a overseer and a murderer of African people who were enslaved back then.
This is what I think my whole life.
And now this white dude in the community goes and does the research and says, Hey, you know what?
Turns out, it wasn't that guy.
He didn't do that.
And as a matter of fact, he saved the lives of hundreds of Native Americans.
I would be in no hurry to unhate that guy, right?
If all this time I thought that dude was that evil person, even when I found the truth, I still would feel some kind of way.
That's a natural feeling, I get that.
Oh, I'm glad we're empathizing with this side that we've firmly established is just 100% factually wrong.
You cannot argue with my characterization there.
That is just what we are to believe.
And so, holy shit, I hope when I do this research, that better be ironclad, wouldn't you think?
What ends up happening next in Hakim's story?
It takes a decidedly nasty and personal turn.
He is offered a job at George Mason University, and there is an accusation.
What I heard people were saying was that I had sexually harassed a woman at my university.
I was at Florida Tech.
And that in my federal grants that I received, that I had absconded with federal money, that I had stolen money.
These accusations are made in a roundabout way on Twitter.
Okay, good.
Glad once again we got one side of a Twitter feud again on the podcast of record.
Good.
And in a phone call to another physics professor at George Mason University, who properly takes them to the administration at George Mason.
And George Mason in turn gets in touch with the Florida Institute of Technology.
It's very important to note that there is no there there.
Florida Institute of Technology had investigated these accusations a couple of years earlier and reinvestigated those, found nothing there.
I spent a good three weeks of reporting time trying to track down these allegations, talking to many former students, and I could find nothing.
And nor did Florida Institute of Technology, nor did George Mason, which went ahead with its hire.
And in fact, Hakeem Oluseyi is now a visiting professor at George Mason.
And now he's dead.
Rest in- Oh wait!
No, he was fine and he just got the job?
Is the end of that?
What?
I have to point out something that I'm sure occurred to you, Michael, while you were reporting this, which is, at this point in the story, you're looking into the reputation of someone who was attacked after looking into the reputation of someone else who was attacked.
And perhaps all these attacks are coming from the same set of sources.
That's very important.
And perhaps all these attacks are coming from the same set of sources.
We are to believe, and this is not mere, like, hinting at.
That's pretty direct.
We are to believe that they, he went through this series of arguments.
He's had the facts the whole time, guys.
He's, he's, everything is right.
And he tries to, hey, please listen to me.
I have the undisputed facts.
And they're like, we don't care about your facts.
No, but really.
Ah, well, he could have quit.
He should have resigned his job, actually.
Ah, you keep moving the goalposts.
Oh, yeah?
Well, now we're gonna make false allegations about you.
Isn't that definitely what we're led to believe here?
Yes.
This is the politics of personal destruction that accompany So many disputes these days where one challenges the consensus around a particular issue, and it's not enough to argue with that, to say, no, no, no, you're wrong because of X, Y, and Z. You need to take that person down.
And personal reputations are destroyed.
It's an unfortunately common aspect of intellectual debate these days.
Lest you thought I was exaggerating, he's specifically tying those allegations to the other side here.
He's saying it's not enough To argue with him, you have to take him down.
They accompany these debates because of it.
So we are pretty firmly given the impression that like, maybe, I don't know, Chanda Prescott Weinstein?
Maybe some of the other people he's mentioned?
I think that's the only name he's really mentioned on the other side.
Are we to believe she did this?
Are we to believe just someone associated with the other side of these arguments did this to Oluseyi?
Seems like that's a pretty clear assumption here.
So we know how this story ends, of course.
The James Webb Space Telescope is up in the skies.
We know it is named the James Webb Space Telescope.
But has NASA itself ever officially weighed in on this entire saga and debate about Webb and about his past?
Yes, they have.
Their in-house historian.
Oh, they have an in-house historian?
That's weird.
Why wouldn't that have been the first person they went to, rather than Hakeem Olachei?
That's odd.
Their in-house historian did a quite complete report that essentially ratified everything Hakeem had found.
Now, the report's very careful.
History's complicated, right?
We can't know with 100% certainty what James Webb really believed in his heart.
But the report goes through every accusation against him, and the historical record just doesn't back those up.
Once again, every accusation against him.
So I sure hope they went through, to the best of their ability, every accusation that was relevant here, that was plausible, that people on the other side made.
This is very strong language.
They're saying there's no evidence.
Totally cleared.
Exonerated.
So where is Hakim?
I think when one goes through a crucible like this, and it was a crucible for Hakeem in his telling, it certainly has left him with a sense of precisely how fraught and charged our cultural moment is.
And has any of this in his mind changed his life, changed his trajectory?
I think when one goes through a crucible like this, and it was a crucible for Hakeem in his telling, it certainly has left him with a sense of precisely how fraught and charged our cultural moment is.
But when I've asked him, if you could go back, knowing what you know now, would you still do this?
Yeah, I'd definitely do it again.
I mean, you know, there's not a regret for having looked into this.
I mean, I think he feels that he did what he felt he had an intellectual obligation to do, which was to look at these charges as clearly as he could and come to some conclusions.
That turned out to be right.
That turned out to be right, yes.
That turned out to be right.
Just to emphasize one more time how much they are just endorsing this view.
Yep, that turned out to be right.
Just saying it one more time.
Turned out to be right.
100% right.
He's right.
He's the right one.
He's the one who's right.
He was the one who's right.
The other side, who the fuck knows who they are and they suck and they don't listen to anything.
I had no personal connection to James Webb.
There was nothing that made me want to exonerate James Webb.
There was nothing that made me feel like I could somehow gain an advantage from doing this.
If anything, I knew that there was only a downside.
There was nothing in it for me, period.
But once I found out the truth, I was now bound to reveal that truth.
It's my duty.
It's my responsibility.
My honor could have it no other way.
Wow, he's just, he had no personal motivations in this, everyone.
He was just a noble truth-teller who suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in order to make the truth known.
Because he has an obligation to the truth.
Did they tell us what the other side was?
Are they people who feel an obligation to the truth?
Are they truth-tellers?
Are they researchers?
Are they scientists?
Are they from a hard scout?
Nope, don't know anything the fuck about them.
You know, in reflecting on this whole saga, you have to imagine that there are other I'm sorry, what?
Are they just pumping out telescopes?
that aren't right.
Other moments where lots of people think that a James Webb, someone like that did wrong. - I'm sorry, what?
Are they just pumping out telescopes?
Just massive James Webb took 20 fucking years or whatever.
Are we just cranking those out?
Why would there be a bunch of other of these situations?
This is a very specific situation.
Again, burdens of proof and not just burdens of proof, but the things you are wanting to prove or disprove are very different depending on the context.
I mean, I hope that much is clear, but just in case it's not, if I'm in a court of law and I'm putting someone on trial and I'm saying, did you murder Ned Johnson?
It is perfectly good.
In fact, it's how justice should work.
To say, well, you know, even though there's some evidence here, it's just, it's not, it needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
Needs to be beyond a reasonable doubt.
Has to be.
It's got to be beyond a reasonable doubt because you don't want to make that mistake.
Cool.
That defendant is exonerated.
He goes outside and the Nobel prize committee calls him and they're like, you won the Nobel peace prize.
And people are like, wait, what, what, what?
For what?
And they're like, well, you see, there's no evidence that he didn't kill that person.
Yeah, but look at all the evidence that he did.
Like there was, yes, it wasn't beyond a shadow of a doubt, but like, he was there, he had the bloody knife.
Yeah, there's no video of him doing it, but like, we're going to honor this guy with a Nobel Peace Prize happens every fucking year.
This telescope is once in a maybe lifetime.
You're telling me the same standard of proof applies?
And you just keep pointing back to it, by the way.
They don't make any better argument than that.
They're just, yeah, look, there's no evidence that he killed Ned Johnson.
There's just not quite any.
We can't for sure say, but it wasn't established.
Yeah, but he shouldn't be getting the Nobel Peace Prize.
What are you talking about?
Find someone who did a positive, good thing.
But there isn't a Hakeem-like figure devoting the time and, in this case, reputational cost to challenging those narratives.
Because it's just not worth it for them, as we can see.
And so, in that sense, it strikes me that Hakeem's story is inspiring, right?
The lengths he went, the years he devoted to it, the risks he was willing to tolerate.
Or it's a kind of extreme cautionary tale because who wants to endure all of that just to correct the record for some dead guy, right?
Absolutely.
And in fact, in my reporting, I talked to many physicists who did not want to go on the record talking about this.
They said to me, you know, Hakeem got it right and I ain't going there because if I go there, I'm going to get attacked.
And one hears this Frankly, all the time in academia.
You know when I mentioned that language that perfectly mirrored the intellectual dork web and all that?
This was the biggest example.
This is word for word.
When people who I was listening to, like as I established last episode, the skeptics, Sam Harris, all those people, when they started completely forgetting going after any religion to just going after progressives and SJWs is probably what they called them at the time or the regressive left or all that.
This is what they said.
They said, like, oh, it's horrible out there.
It's professors, college students are the worst.
They're saying quietly.
They don't want to talk out loud.
They're saying, to me, they're saying, like, it's horrible out there.
Like, you don't even, you know, like, I can't even say anything or I'll get fired.
They're telling me.
A lot of them, they're all telling me that.
And I know that there are those, you know, number of very prominent, you know, liberal scholars and activists who say that this doesn't happen.
But I'm just saying, like, I'm in those conversations.
Yeah, I know there's people with actual, you know, like degrees and stuff that are saying I'm full of shit, but like, man, I've, like, I promise.
Yeah, I don't doubt, Michael Powell, that the kinds of people you choose to talk to are probably intellectual dork-web type people who will tell you that, because that's their bias.
You probably interviewed Jordan Peterson, who probably, I don't know if he still has a faculty spot, I don't think he does, but there's an equivalent who still has a faculty spot who's like, yeah, no, this is, this is, it's impossible to cancel culture.
The kids, they're out of control.
Yeah, man.
But then a bunch of people who actually have credentials are like, yeah, but that's someone with kind of an axe to grind.
That's not really representative of what's going on.
But no, it's just reported breathlessly is an adjective they use a lot with this.
This is breathless, 100%.
This whole thing is breathlessly reporting how great Olashe is, how obvious it is that he's right, and how the other side has absolutely no fucking idea and they don't listen to facts.
And when you say this is happening, what you mean is a form of fear and self-censorship that makes people fear articulating the truth.
Yes.
So to that view, right.
A Hakeem Olachei is either a inspiring tale of an intellectual who stood up for what he believed in and what he had found, or he's a cautionary tale, as you say, of where you don't want to go.
Right.
Because after all, this podcast was made in memory of Dr. Hakeem Olachei, who died by stoning.
What happened to him?
Let's revisit.
So there were those allegations that Michael Powell tells us were 100% bogus.
I can't verify that, because that's not even information that the public has at all.
I'm sure he somehow tracked down maybe a victim, but like, we have no information on that.
And furthermore, we were led to believe that maybe even Chanda Prescod-Weinstein herself Was the one who phoned in these things.
There was a comment made on Twitter, they say.
And here's what it says in the article.
He's a little more careful.
They're a little more careful in the podcast.
Maybe because in the intervening five months, a bunch of people were like, what the fuck?
This is so irresponsible.
In the article, it says, as word circulated in academia that Dr. Olashile might win an appointment at George Mason, he heard from a professor at a different university who claimed that Dr. Olashile had mishandled a federal grant and sexually harassed a woman.
Dr. Plavchan said that he reported these accusations to George Mason.
Soon, Florida Tech officials were combing through records and thousands of emails.
They found nothing to substantiate these charges, according to Hamid K. Rasool, a physics professor at Florida Tech and former dean who took part in the investigation.
George Mason went ahead with its appointment in the fall of 2021.
Wow, all of immediately after.
Talk about timeline.
I'm just realizing now, they crunched the timeline of how this happened.
Five years felt like five minutes.
And then they expanded the timeline of this abusive, horrible situation he went through to that's within a year.
Within a year, all this happened.
And he not only was accused of something apparently falsely, but it was cleared instantly.
And he got that job within the same year.
Interesting.
Listen to this, though.
On Twitter, Dr. Prescott Weinstein has pushed some of the same accusations while not naming Dr. Olushaei directly.
Quote, it continues to be the case that academic institutions play past the harasser.
End quote.
She wrote in a veiled reference to Dr. Olushaei in August 2021.
And this past November, she questioned on Twitter why journalists have not asked why he left his last job.
Dr. Prescott Weinstein did not reply to three emails asking for more information.
So I'll just once again say that if you are going to strongly imply, if not just outright tell us, that Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is essentially responsible or part of a group who are responsible for, in a fit of hysteria after, you know, being proven wrong so many times and having to keep moving the goalposts, then they just spread false allegations.
If you're going to have us believe that, you better be fucking ironclad in your proof.
And he has no proof.
And Prescod-Weinstein says on Twitter, yeah, unfortunately there are a lot of men in science my tweets could have been referring to.
So it's pretty irresponsible to just assume she was talking about Oluseyi and therefore that that must have been the reason these allegations were made.
So to that view, right, Hakeem Oluseyi is either a inspiring tale of an intellectual who stood up for what he believed in and what he had found, or he's a cautionary tale, as you say, of where you don't want to go.
This next part, again, I had already, I was already so fucking mad.
Listen to this next part and I'll try not to throw something.
Right.
Now the other way to think of this entire story, Michael, is that the people who are mad about the web telescope from the start were making a larger point.
What?
And that a factual error here and there, a reputation that maybe gets trampled.
It isn't ultimately as important as communicating a message about fairness and equality within an institution like the State Department or NASA.
And that you don't make omelets without breaking eggs.
You don't change the world without occasionally bruising people.
Yeah, I suppose if you're not the egg being broken, that's perhaps a more comfortable position.
But I think it's fair to say that we venture into dangerous waters if we say that, well, truth can be sacrificed for a greater good.
Did somebody say that?
It seems to me, in looking at the life of Hakeem Oluseyi, you see the downside risk pretty profoundly.
Oh yeah, because he's dead, by the way.
They killed him.
Stone to death.
Oh wait, no, hold on, wait a minute.
He just got that job the same year and is fine.
I mean, honestly, I keep making the joke, but like, they talk about him as though he died.
Like, this is a cautionary tale.
Boy, the costs, the tolls, the whatever.
And I'll grant, look, from personal experience, I'll grant that it sucks if people are dragging you online.
Sure.
But like, he got the fucking job!
They investigated, which you should do, and they're like, there's nothing here, and I can't speak to that, but if that's what they found, that's what they found, and then he got the fucking job!
I don't, like, what are you talking about?
Do we have any idea if Prescott Weinstein has been harassed?
If any of the other people have been harassed?
I bet they have been!
They usually are, way more than the powerful people.
Do we know anything about that?
What about the cost of their careers?
What have they done?
What about their reputation?
Do we know anything about that?
Or are we just crying over someone who literally had nothing happen to them besides some people were mean?
And I just have to say, that last part, it just fucking kills me.
How could Barbaro sit there with a straight face and say, well, you know, I'm again trying to explain why these fucking idiots are wrong and don't care about facts.
I'm just brainstorming, just spitballing.
What if As they were taking down the reputation of James Webb knowingly, falsely doing that, what if they're actually making a different point?
They're like, eh, who fucking cares about facts?
It's more important that, you know, we communicate a message of fairness and acceptance.
I can't tell you, and I shouldn't have to tell you, how intellectually fucking irresponsible that is.
I would be saying that's intellectually irresponsible if it was like a center-right podcast that did it.
And was characterizing the other side as that.
I'd be like, well, you're being fucking unreasonable.
What are you talking about?
Nobody thinks that.
This is the New York Times.
This is the New York fucking Times.
And they're just going to sit there on the same podcast where they refuse to say that Trump knew the thing he's saying in a tape he knew.
They're going to just tell you that the entire other side Just doesn't care.
And not only do they not care about facts, they're going to try to explain, like, why... I wonder why these people just don't fucking care about facts.
Oh, I know.
It's probably because they're making a different point.
They're just like, don't give a shit about facts.
And they're like, who cares?
Because really, we just want to communicate fairness.
No one thinks that.
You are talking about a position that no one holds.
Absolutely no one holds that position.
Zero people.
Here's what you might be talking about.
You might have heard someone say, well, yeah, I mean, there could be some risk.
We're wrong here.
But like, what's the what's the risk?
It doesn't matter that much.
Like, it's more important to try to make sure that the person we're naming this fucking telescope after is not a piece of shit.
Like, I think we should be pretty certain of that.
So like, yeah, OK, it's maybe it's a little fuzzy.
We don't know for sure that he was bad, but like, Why don't we just find someone where there's no gray area?
Nobody holds that position.
What they actually hold, and I could tell you this without even having researched it, what they actually think is, no, we do think he's a shitty guy.
We have other facts that, like, you can disagree with him if you want.
You're free to say you disagree with our interpretation of the facts, but we have an interpretation of the facts, and it's that he was complicit for the following reasons.
And he was a bad guy for the following reasons.
And Oluseyi is just not engaging with that.
But because Oluseyi is the one with the mic and Michael Powell is a shameless fucking anti-woke advocate, they are the ones with the megaphone saying, yeah, I wonder why these people don't give a shit about facts.
It's so weird.
I'm trying to figure it out.
They just don't care.
Like it's the whole other side.
They're just, you know, like I just quit even trying because I don't care about facts.
Really?
Or do they really disagree with your interpretation of the facts?
And by the way, maybe they're right.
Is that what's actually happening?
It's incredib- I can't- This is so- This is shitty journalism.
Really, really, really shitty journalism.
And it's a problem.
It's really bad.
And I also love this idea that like, wow, who knows how many poor, long-dead white men victims there are.
If there's not a saint!
Solely dedicated to facts, like Oluseyi, to help us.
What will we do?
We could be wrong about everything.
Maybe every consensus ever is wrong because of this one guy who we interviewed, who told us one side of a Twitter fight.
Maybe everything I know is wrong because of that.
What are we to do?
And they're like, yeah, no one's, who's going to defend the long dead white man?
Who?
Oh no.
If only there was, you know, like the biggest news network that did that all day, every day.
If only they had that.
America's Maoist revolution against offensive statues didn't take long to move beyond his monuments to the confederacy.
Christopher Columbus is now a target for some reason.
Well since the radical left never takes a vacation from hating on all things American, today was their annual hate on Christopher Columbus day.
Now this was the take from the endearing folks over at Salon.
I don't understand the adulation that some Italian-Americans continue to bestow on Christopher Columbus, who, as history demonstrates, was less a hero than a thug exploiting and enslaving indigenous peoples.
A better, more sober assessment comes from Zubair Simonson in the National Catholic Register, who asked, Are we, the beneficiaries of his exploration, going to laud a man for having a conviction, ambition, and courage?
Or should we blame that man for anything that went wrong afterward, including events far beyond his control or events that he hadn't been there for, without even trying to consider how his times were different from our own?
Boy, those sure sound like a lot of the same fucking shit arguments that we just heard.
I mean, look, he had conviction when he, you know, enslaved those people.
He did it with grit and fortitude.
And who are we to judge?
Like, we're not gonna appreciate the people he enslaved for us?
Come on.
Ungrateful people?
Yeah, no.
We have plenty of people to defend the status quo.
This is classic Darvo reverse victim and oppressor shit.
You have the people with a megaphone giving only their side on the podcast of record saying, who will defend the definitely problematic white men from the definitely accurate accusations that they sucked?
Who will spread misinformation about how they didn't actually suck?
That's all of Fox News.
That's all of mainstream society.
That's the norm.
That's out there.
Everybody does.
The progressives are the small group of people trying to stop doing that.
This victim mentality that these two white guys have on this podcast.
They're so, oh wow, who will do it?
I mean, just look at what happened to Hakeem Olaseyi.
After all, he stood up for James Webb and he was killed.
By the way, rest in peace.
This podcast, oh wait, no, I'm sorry.
He's completely fine.
Once again, I keep forgetting.
He's 100% fine.
Nothing's happened to him, except a few angry tweets.
So here's the neat little bow they put on this.
Let's listen to this very carefully, everyone.
So we know how this story ends, of course.
The James Webb Space Telescope is up in the skies.
We know it is named the James Webb Space Telescope.
But has NASA itself ever officially weighed in on this entire saga and debate about Webb and about his past?
Yes, they have.
Their in-house historian did a quite complete report that essentially ratified everything Hakeem had found.
Now, the report's very careful.
History's complicated, right?
We can't know with 100% certainty what James Webb really believed in his heart, but the report goes through every accusation against him, and the historical record just doesn't back those up.
So what they don't tell you here at all was that this was a long, agonizing process for NASA, and they left people hanging for a long time.
They gave a stalling statement for a long time.
We're looking into it.
We're looking into it.
We'll have a full report for you.
We're looking into it.
We'll have a full report.
Because people were concerned.
Hey, figure this out.
And for the most part, they were satisfied with that.
Like, OK, cool.
Yeah, look into it and issue us a full report of your decision.
Would it surprise you to learn that when NASA announced that they were just going to go ahead and stick with James Webb, that the contract historian who they were working with had literally not even started yet?
Would that surprise you?
In fact, ironically, the same day of the announcement was the day he was scheduled to start his research.
And then you might be thinking, well, Thomas, how could you possibly know that?
How could you know when they started the research and that process and how that went?
Well, would it also surprise you to learn that there were some FOIA requests that revealed tons of internal emails that reveal how stupid this was, how botched it was, how they definitely knew the truth and were just going to fucking do it anyway.
Geez, wouldn't you think some of that would be relevant?
Well, I think it is.
So next time on Where There's Woke, we dig into the history, what it actually says, and those emails.
Because goddammit, I read 900 pages of internal NASA emails and I'm gonna make you listen to what I have to say about it.
If you think it's bad now, if I at all convinced you how bad this reporting was already, just wait until I share the actual facts behind all this.
That's next time.
Go to patreon.com slash where there's woke.
And you can hear a nice bonus with Eli Bosnick on the elevator gate video.
It's so funny.
We go through that whole video that I covered a little bit of.
