WTW36: Fighting Back Against the Campus Outrage Machine
Dr. Isaac Kamola joins us to discuss the work he's done to expose the partisan mechanics that fuel websites like CampusReform and The College Fix. How exactly does this machine operate? Who is behind it all? Why is Christopher Rufo the absolute worst? And, to help professors who experience this targeted harassment, Dr. Kamola founded Faculty First Responders to provide resources and support. Dr. Kamola's book: Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War The Study: https://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/facpub/367/ Feel free to email us at lydia@seriouspod.com or thomas@seriouspod.com! Please pretty please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/wherethereswoke!
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Hello and welcome to Where There's Woke.
This is episode 37.
I'm Thomas.
That's Lydia.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I am so excited for this one.
This is kind of what we've been building to this episode with the last few.
So this is an interview we did with someone who is really trying to fight back against some of the crap that you heard in the last two episodes.
Yeah.
Yeah, Dr. Isaac Kamola out of Trinity College.
He's a political science professor.
I feel like we've just been talking about a lot of political science professors, but he's really doing a lot of good work, has some great stories to share, and some, I think, beacons of hope and things that we can all work towards together so we don't feel so hopeless.
Yeah, he's got a lot of really good insight into the mechanics of how this bullshit machine works, essentially.
All right, can't wait to get to that.
Before we do, we'll just note, first off, got a couple more releases coming within the end of the month flurry.
So look forward to more great stuff.
Can't wait.
And also, if you'd like to not have to hear the auto ad that's coming, go to patreon.com slash where there's woke and you'll get the full version of the bonus that will be another thing being released very, very soon, probably today.
Yep.
So patreon.com slash where there's woke.
Thank you so much for listening.
Let's get on over to this interview.
And we're joined by Dr. Isaac Kamola, a professor of political science from Trinity College.
Hi, Dr. Kamola.
How are you?
I'm doing okay.
How about you?
Pretty good.
And Thomas is here, too.
Hi, Thomas.
Thanks for joining me.
I'm not a professor or anything.
I'm just a guy.
Just a guy, exactly.
I think actually you stumbled on this, Han, when you were looking at, you know, some studies and stuff that are going on in the news.
And there was a data snapshot that came out regarding campus reform.
We'll get into that.
But the snapshot spoke about the professors that are, I guess, targeted by campus reform and what that looks like.
And so we reached out because we thought this was a really interesting study.
Sort of a really cool blend of our two projects, too, with Serious Injuries Only and Where There's Woke.
And Dr. Kamolli, you were so kind and generous with your time, and you and I chatted a little bit back and forth, and thanks for joining us so we could talk about this some more.
Absolutely.
It's my pleasure.
Thanks for talking about this really important issue that I think goes understudied and misunderstood by most of the public today.
Yeah.
Before we dive into that, do you want to give some information about what you study and kind of, I guess, how you started going down this area of research in particular?
Sure.
I call myself a reluctant expert in the right-wing politics of higher education.
I'm a professor or assistant professor of political science, and I study the social role of higher education, the political economy of higher education, and the ways in which universities and the knowledge that universities produce affect the world that we live in.
Kind of arguing there is no such thing as an ivory tower, that universities are active producers of the world that we inhabit.
That was my research.
In 2017, I was working in June, like I'm a nerd, so I was in my office doing work over the summer, and I got a text, an email, phone calls.
My office phone started blowing up saying that I had to evacuate campus.
My kids went to the child care center that was across campus.
So I walked across campus not knowing, was there an active shooter?
Was there a bomb threat?
What the heck was going on?
I picked up my kids and when I got home I started texting around trying to figure out what was going on, what this incident was.
After a little while, a friend said, I think it's something, some story on campus reform.
And I was like, what the heck is campus reform?
And at that point, it was before they had even more money dumped into them.
It was a grainy website with this kind of distorted visuals and graphics and this really kind of ominous tone.
And it basically said that my colleague had said something that was, you know, he called for, well, I'm not even going to repeat what they accused him of saying.
And basically that this had caused what we later found out were credible threats of violence to be called into the campus.
So I'm a social scientist, and I'm thinking, what is this phenomenon?
What the heck is going on?
So I was trying to figure that out at the same time that my administration was punishing my colleague, putting him on mandatory leave, and accusing him of violating academic freedom.
I was part of the American Association of University Professors, the Trinity chapter.
I was the president at the time.
And we vigorously defended my colleague and his academic freedom rights, basically saying that this was targeted harassment.
And that summer I went to the Summer Institute, the AAUP Summer Institute in Cincinnati, where I met a colleague who became a collaborator named Ralph Wilson, who studies right-wing money in higher education.
I went up to Ralph after his presentation.
He was with a group then called Uncoke My Campus, which studies right-wing donor influence.
That's a great name.
It is a great ape.
And basically I introduced myself and we started talking about the right-wing harassment of my colleague and he just started to explain who Campus Reform was and where they fit within this broader right-wing ecosystem, political ecosystem.
And all of a sudden it began to kind of make a lot more sense.
So I wrote a paper about it called Dear Administrators, if you want to defend your faculty from right-wing attacks, follow the money.
And then I noticed, I thought, okay, I'm a political scientist.
I answered my question.
I now know where this attack came from.
And then I began to become aware that more and more people I knew, colleagues, friends, friends from grad school had faced similar kinds of attacks, but they didn't make it to national news.
But some friends, you know, had really terrible situations where, you know, violent death threats, you know, just terrible stuff.
Some of them had their jobs were in jeopardy, and it really made me mad that this was going on.
And so in January of 2020, I just started reading Campus Reform every day.
Whenever they accused a faculty of doing some sort of outrage, I would reach out to that faculty and just say, so you know, here's who Campus Reform is.
This is what they do.
Here's my research on where they come from and who funds them.
And then that grew into a program called Faculty First Responders.
And now we're monitoring about a dozen websites that are known to produce content that leads to the targeted harassment of faculty.
And I've done a bunch of research about it.
I've written a book called Free Speech and Coke Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War with Ralph Wilson that looks at this kind of broader political infrastructure that has a real keen interest in subverting public education, higher education.
Can we zoom in?
Because we've covered the bullshit version of this, where it's like the inverse stranger things, mirror universe thing where a professor does it or says a racist thing and then pretends that they're being targeted in this way by leftists.
Yeah.
And then does it like we did a whole series on that.
And what's funny is like that's kind of the only version that I'm super familiar with because we did a lot of research into that and how much actual legal protection professors do have in a lot of ways.
We haven't really looked into detail at the other version, which is, oh, no, someone's actually getting targeted.
Some professor out there isn't trying to defend their academic freedom to be racist.
They're actually trying to defend their academic freedom to do academic things that are legitimate.
Can you zoom in a bit on I'd love to hear about real cases if you can, but if not, at least a kind of a summary of how that tends to go or the kinds of things you're talking about.
That's a great question.
So what we demonstrate in our book is that the ways in which higher education is conceptualized as working, right, is around a principle that's called academic freedom, which basically means that The university is not a place where you should just be able to go around and say everything.
Or you can, but it doesn't mean those ideas have to be taken seriously, right?
So if you are in a climate science department and you go around saying that climate change is not man-made, then you're going against the vast majority of credible argumentation, books, research, and the disciplinary established truth.
And if you want to disprove that established truth, you have a very, very high threshold.
Or it's totally fine to not take your arguments as credible because you haven't done the work to demonstrate the merit of your arguments.
Well, plus we have people who speak out against the idea that climate change is man-made.
We usually don't.
You have those people executed in universities and then they're not allowed.
As we demonstrate in our book, there's an effort to kind of blur this line between what is academic freedom and what is free speech.
Because that's what I read on campus reform.
OK, yeah.
As we demonstrate in our book, there's an effort to kind of blur this line between what is academic freedom and what is free speech.
So basically making campuses into places in which anybody can say whatever they want.
And this is the, you know, concerted effort that right wing, well-funded right wing interests have made precisely because the universities are making certain kinds of claims that corporate and wealthy interests don't particularly like.
So, for example, that could be that climate change is man-made.
I think that the Koch brothers would rather have a debate about whether climate change is real.
And in fact, they funded a lot of the think tanks like the Heartland Institute and others that have specialized in promoting But then there's professors and universities saying, hey, you know, there's a scientific body of evidence that disproves those claims that climate change is not man-made, right?
And that's established fact within the scholarship.
And so making things that are disciplinarily or academically kind of taken as kind of your starting assumptions, there's a lot of those that the right wing is really interested in not being of undermining.
But this goes back to like this whole idea, this whole narrative of a war on woke, which is largely created through a kind of a stringing together of a bunch of anecdotes.
So you have, yeah, sure, there's one professor over here who says something and there's a backlash against them.
But because you have organizations like Campus Reform, the College Fix, and other outlets that are taking kind of a war footing against higher education, they repeatedly string together these anecdotes as evidence That there is this deep-seated, you know, hatred of America, that we're all cultural Marxists who hate America, and we're indoctrinating your students, and we're grooming your children, and all of this stuff.
An outlet like Campus Reform, what it does is it exists to kind of paint the academy in the worst light as possible, as a way of basically saying, hey, those institutions, you know, are really dodgy.
And we can talk about kind of where the campus reform fits within the broader political infrastructure, if you're interested in that, too.
Yeah, definitely.
I did want to raise, you know, part of the research that you all looked at, too, was where the speech was happening that campus reform was targeting.
And what was something that was pretty striking to me is that the vast majority of the speech that was called into question and lambasted, I guess, on the article itself was often like the professor's social media.
And they're a Twitter page, and it's not usually things that are happening in the classroom or papers that they're publishing.
And that seemed to really be, I don't know, just sort of this invigorating thing for the right in those scenarios.
And it's just striking to me that when we're talking about, I guess, that blurred line of academic freedom, free speech, that the issues that they're finding anyway are like, you have to stalk someone's Facebook profile basically to find it.
Yeah, and then there's also this intentional conflation that says what somebody says on Twitter is obviously indicative of how they teach in the classroom.
Right.
They said this thing, and therefore when you are in the classroom with them, it must be nothing but indoctrination.
Without much evidence, I mean, most professors teach in a way where we introduce lots of different ideas, lots of different sides.
Many pride ourselves in having the students not even be able to know where we sit politically, or if we do let students know that we have clear pedagogical reasons for doing it.
Being a professor is like a highly trained profession that many of us spend decades and decades learning how to do well.
And having a conversation in a classroom over difficult texts with 20 year olds is an incredibly artful thing that takes a lot of practice to learn how to do well.
And I wouldn't want my entire career trying to figure out that balance be defined by, you know, one tweet that I sent off at two in the morning without thinking about it, or that some tweet that was found by a political organization who specializes in targeting faculty or that some tweet that was found by a political organization who specializes in targeting faculty and manufacturing outrage about faculty dug up and In the least flattering light.
That's exactly what's going on in these situations where there's a professionalization of the manufacturing of outrage.
And then that outrage then goes and becomes the anecdotes and the footnotes in the broader kind of think tank arguments about all of the indoctrination and critical race theory and all that stuff that's going on that's supposedly going on in higher education.
Yeah.
I mean, that's exactly why I started this show.
I mean, or one of all of them.
I mean, I came into this thing just as like a kind of, I don't know if neutral is the right word, but I wasn't, way back in like 2014 or 15, I wasn't really in this stew at all.
And then there's like a series of these exact anecdotes that you're talking about, and they're not always college kids and professors, but a high percentage of them are, at least in the broader sense.
Obviously, campus reform is focused on that, but just in the broader war, it's stupid anecdotes that It's funny because I've been doing some archival research a little bit on kind of the first one that I looked into just when I was just covering it as a guy.
I had no agenda.
I was just like looking into this thing that a lot of people were talking about.
And it was funny to see.
I looked into it.
I was like, oh, this seems kind of weird.
Oh, this narrative isn't true.
This narrative is true or this whatever.
And then I took it in good faith and was just like, okay, well, a little bit overblown, but okay, here's some stuff here.
And then the next several years just proceeded to be time after time where it was more and more bullshit.
And also you notice all of the YouTubers, whoever it is, the machinery of people drilling these points home over and over and over, they don't do any debunking.
Even the ones that are solidly debunked, that goes into their memory banks as a reference.
Like, oh, it's like the time this happened and this happened.
And it takes you so much longer to go through each of those things to Google it or to Wikipedia it or to whatever it and say, oh, well, that's not really how that happened.
Like, that's kind of unfair.
And it all adds together to be this massive misinformation kind of package that just it's so powerful and it's hard to find.
I'm glad you're fighting back against it because it takes so much more work to untangle than it does to just throw crap at the wall.
That's a great point.
And my rule of thumb is if nothing becomes a something overnight, there's probably a political infrastructure behind it, right?
Where all of a sudden everybody is talking from the same talking points.
That's where my antenna go up and say, wait a minute, what is going on?
Like, how is it that an obscure academic legal theory, like critical race theory, all of a sudden everybody's talking about it at the same time?
Well, you have to go back and you have to find the political infrastructure that's there that basically decided as a response to Black Lives Matter, we have to create a villain that we can hang all of these discussions about race on and treat as the enemy.
And so what campus reform, the college fix, and the right-wing media ecosystem is, is that they kind of create what we call this echo chamber, repeating these anecdotes that is primed to identify a certain interpretation of higher education that, as you mentioned, is not according to journalistic ethics.
I've talked to faculty who have had stories written about them by campus reform, and they just tell me that is not at all what happened, or that's not what my research article said.
In one case, I know somebody who got fired.
I talked with a professor who got fired for making a Facebook post on a private Facebook page that was a kind of inside joke among friends, and then it got screen captured and then shared publicly, And then it became this kind of phenomenon, you know, and he lost his job.
Cancel culture at work.
Yeah, but it's not just I mean, I think that there's a disjunction, right?
And that like, there's a difference between people saying mean, unsupportive, racist, homophobic, transphobic things in public, and then people saying, hey, you should be held accountable for that, right?
That there has to be some consequence.
And that can just be, hey, we don't like what you're saying, because that's also a form of speech.
Like what you said was hateful.
We don't like that.
We're going to protest.
Talk about echo chamber.
That is this message of the show frequently.
Yes.
Like, I mean, I think a lot of what when people say cancel culture, what they can be referring to is people holding other people accountable for being assholes.
Yeah.
And very often their argument would suggest that speech only goes one way.
You know, like often they're arguing from a position of someone's allowed to say something racist and shitty and you can't do anything about it.
But the thing you want to do about it is also speech.
Like that also should be free speech in this country.
Exactly.
And that is very different from a political infrastructure that exists to identify people, to create outrage about them, and then to manufacture situations in which people become, for no fault of their own, become targets of harassment.
Can you talk a little bit more about how campus reform works?
Like what specifically they do in that political infrastructure?
So campus reform is part of the Leadership Institute.
The Leadership Institute was founded by a conservative activist back in the 1970s, I believe, named Morton Blackwell.
And Morton Blackwell trains conservative college activists.
So they have a lot of money and they bring students from college campuses to their headquarters in Virginia.
And they train them on how to basically be conservative actors.
Piece of shit.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, so they'll train them how to videotape administrators and then cut those videotapes and leak them and how to table and how to do all kinds of stuff.
Right.
Now, the campus reform was created as their wing of this project to train conservative journalists.
So based on a contract that we found as a part of our research, we found that when students sign up to be a correspondent, they sign a contract that says that they are going to identify liberal bias on their college campus.
Like, this isn't about objective journalism, like, go out and report on your campus.
What they're doing is they're asking students to find examples of liberal bias.
And then they pay them between $50 and $100.
There's three tiers that goes from $50, $75, and $100.
And they get paid to write these outrage pieces.
And then in exchange for that, they not only get a little bit of cash, but then they also get the credentialing and mentorship and all of that.
And a lot of them end up in right wing media.
Fox News and the Harvard Crimson actually did really great reporting on the fact that when a college student ends up on Fox News, It often comes from campus reform, where Fox News will call the campus reform correspondent and say, hey, we need somebody from this school.
Do you know anybody from this school to go on TV?
And then they'll, you know, prepare the talking points with those students in order to get that message across to that broader audience.
So basically, campus reform exists to recruit conservative partisan Activists and under the guise of being a media operation.
It has a budget of about $2 million a year, just the campus reform part, and hires, I forgot the last count, but hundreds of students.
Well, it's amazing.
It's like a pyramid scheme on top of, not really, but like an MLM on top of...
A right-wing outrage machine.
Exactly.
That explains how effective it is, because it really is effective.
Yep.
And actually, Morton Blackwell made the statement, and this is quoted in Anne Nelson's fantastic book called Shadow Network, where she pulls out the kind of the relationship between libertarian funders and Christian right activists and Republican activists like Morton Blackwell.
And she identifies a quote where Morton Blackwell says that there's political technologies and communication technologies, and there's actually no distinction between the two.
The idea of a media outlet is also a political infrastructure for him.
It's a technology for changing the world in the direction of a more conservative, more right-wing worldview that you aspire the whole world to be.
It's just masquerading as a media outlet.
Wow.
So we love a good debunk.
Like, are there any good stories that you could give us some details of, of here's what happened and here's the reaction or?
Let me think about my greatest hits.
Okay.
Yeah.
I talked to one- Freebird?
Can you play Freebird for us?
I mean, there's so many just heartbreaking stories of faculty that I've been in conversation with.
So there was one professor who had a trans student in his class.
And afterwards, the student came and said, hey, is there a way that we could talk about pronouns as a way for me to feel more comfortable in this class?
And so the professor said, that's a great idea.
Like, that's really what a pedagoge, a teacher should do is like take, you know, from their students, learn.
And so the next day or the next class kind of talked about pronouns.
There was a student then who refused to use the proper pronoun in the class.
So the teacher, kind of as a pedagogical experiment, started misgendering the student who was misgendering the trans student.
Which, when I heard that, I was like, that is just a brilliant teaching device, right?
To kind of give the student an experience of what it's like to be misgendered.
Yeah.
And let me guess, the student learned the lesson and everybody was happily ever after.
Or did they weaponize the very protections that were trying to put in place for trans people in order to cry foul?
Exactly.
And then that professor got thrown under the bus by their institution and got so much harassing email that they left the state because they didn't feel safe.
Wow.
Wow.
What are the actual rights here?
I mean, I know we do have, you mentioned academic freedom, but you've also mentioned a lot of people getting fired.
I mean, sometimes it might be a question of leaving, but is it a thing where it's like, if you're tenured, you have one level, if you're not, you have no, you know, can you talk about the actual levels of protection they might have?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So the way it's supposed to work, and this is according to the American Association of University Professors, the AAUP, which is the professional organization that kind of oversees or kind of has the kind of professional standards.
It's like the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association, but for college professors.
And so they've created a bunch of standards about kind of how speech on campus, how academic freedom on campus should play out.
And basically what their standards are is that originally, prior to the AAUP standards, faculty were what's called at-will employees.
So a good example is a professor at Stanford who was very critical of the railroads.
It just so happened that Stanford was a railroad baron and his widow was on the board of trustees and had him fired.
Oh, we're talking olden times.
Olden times, yeah.
Professors were always at-will professors, at-will employees.
So you served at the leisure of the board of trustees and the president.
So you could always be fired.
So there's a ton of stories of people who were communists, people who were pacifists during the First World War, people who were evolutionists teaching at Christian schools or where only creationism was allowed, in which external influences would come out and have a professor fired.
So what the AAUP created was a standard that basically said that in order to kind of shield faculty from external pressures, so that we aren't just teaching what wealthy donors or what Ron DeSantis or the church wants us to teach, but actually we're teaching the ideas that we've arrived at and aren't pressured from external forces to teach or research, is this process that then becomes the system of tenure.
So basically, what that is, is that as a faculty member, you're evaluated each year and assessed.
And after seven years, you're granted tenure, which means that if you are accused of some sort of malfeasance, then there's a process of review.
And so that you can only be fired for cause.
And what causes is very clearly defined as being something that demonstrates that you're no longer able to carry out the duties of your discipline and your profession.
Right.
So if you engage in gross illegal violations or let's say you are a historian who denies the Holocaust.
If you're a historian who denies the Holocaust, then that means that you are no longer abiding by the basic principles of historical evidence and what it means to be a historian.
But it's really important that it's not for one individual.
It's not for a board of trustees or even the president to make a decision if there's cause for dismissal.
But that is always in the hands of a faculty committee.
So it's the faculty themselves that evaluate whether there is cause for the dismissal of another faculty member.
And so basically, that's where the American system of tenure comes from, is that notion of academic freedom and the protection of academic freedom.
And you don't have to be, quote, tenured in order to have that protection.
The AUP recognizes that that level of protection applies to all faculty or should apply to all faculty.
Right.
The problem is, is that academic freedom and these AAUP policies aren't written into, say, federal labor law or oftentimes even state labor law.
Instead, they're written into faculty manuals and handbooks.
And if you have a union, they're written into collective bargaining agreements.
And so it's oftentimes up to the institutions to enforce academic freedom.
And oftentimes they get, and this is what happened at my school, right?
They got pressure from donors.
They got pressure from parents.
They got pressure from trustees.
And rather than going through the process of having a hearing and having the faculty decide, was there a violation?
They decided to take the issue into their own hands.
And that's kind of what you see over and over and over again.
Is administrations kind of working outside of or creating their own process or acting quickly saying, oh my gosh, this is a crisis.
Are we going to fire this person or this was an outrage, right?
And not going through that review process to see if there really was cause.
Yeah.
I mean, and you have a certain amount of constitutional protection as well, but obviously that involves a lot of legal fighting and everything.
And it also, I guess that might apply more to public universities.
Is there a big distinction to be made there?
There is a distinction, and it gets a little tricky because the First Amendment, it pertains to the government sanctioning speech.
You have a situation in which faculty at state institutions have a different relationship to the First Amendment precisely because they're in public institutions.
There's both First Amendment protections, but then there's also the professional protections of academic freedom.
which are slightly different.
You have the right as a historian to deny the Holocaust.
You have a free speech right to deny the Holocaust.
But what that means is the government won't sanction you for saying that.
But it doesn't mean that your colleagues in the history department have to say, well, and therefore you should, of course, be a professor at our institution, right?
Because in that example, they would say, no, that is cause that even though you can say it according to your First Amendment rights, that that demonstrates that you are no longer fit to be a historian.
You would hope, yeah.
You would hope, yeah.
Do you want to talk a little bit more about the Faculty First Responders project that you put together?
I saw Campus Reform responded when I think you were doing some hiring to staff up the project.
And I thought that was pretty interesting.
Yeah, so basically, it started off, you know, as I said, in January 2020, it was just me.
And then that spring, I hired a student for a kind of a summer fellowship program.
And we helped kind of build up the protocols and put in place a method for tracking that.
And then I worked with a bunch of students, including Sam McCarthy, who was a co-author on the survey that you mentioned, where we surveyed faculty about their experiences being written up by Campus Reform.
And it's gone through a number of different iterations.
We've been funded by a small grant from the American Association of University Professors.
And just this month, we've started an affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers.
I'm now hiring a colleague, Heather Stephan, who is working on doing the monitoring work and keeping track of what different websites are saying and reaching out to the faculty who've been targeted and being able to provide the resources of the AFT as well.
What you provide to the professors that are being targeted, what are some of the things that you all recommend or resources that you offer?
Yeah, so we have a website that includes some information.
So we have a page for faculty, so some recommendations about what happens if you're targeted, how to prevent it, how to respond, what to look out for.
And then we have another page for administrators.
Where we give some recommendations about how to respond and we provide some examples of good responses and bad responses and just to kind of make recommendations about how different groups can respond.
We also do a lot of talks with different AUP chapters and union chapters and different groups who find themselves kind of caught up in these campus attacks.
We're working on kind of some model handbook language and collective bargaining language about how to protect faculty.
I mean, right now, a lot of us faculty are expected to be public-facing, to have publicly relevant research, and to kind of be out there in public.
We also think it's necessary then, if our institutions are asking us to do that, then they should also be providing supports for what happens when we come into the crosshairs of a right-wing group like Campus Reform.
When I was doing some of the research in advance for this, I stumbled on a name that you're probably familiar with because it looks like he did a lot of writing, Anthony Gokowski, with campus reform and everything.
One of the articles that he wrote that I thought was really interesting was highlighting that the ADF created a resource to help students defend their free speech.
Yeah.
And then I just thought it was an interesting juxtaposition in the coverage of that versus the coverage of the resource that you all are putting together intended to help the professors and their academic freedom and free speech.
I think that was the author who wrote the piece about my colleague.
I think so.
I think that's how I stumbled on it because I clicked on him and saw that this was another piece he wrote and I was like, oh, that's really...
The ADF, the Alliance Defending Freedom, is a group that we look at in our book.
And in that book, we focus quite a bit on student groups.
So in addition to media groups like Campus Reform, you also have student groups like Students for Liberty, Young Americans for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, Turning Points USA.
that receive funding from a lot of the same donors and are responsible for engaging in a lot of activity on campus that oftentimes has included bringing controversial speakers to campus.
It's these groups that bring Miley Yiannopoulos or Ben Shapiro or Gavin McGinnis to campus in order to kind of create these controversies, these free speech controversies that can then be pointed to and said, hey, you know, you are violating our free speech.
And so you have these student groups that are kind of like the boots on the ground and the eyes and ears on the ground.
And in the case of the ADF, what they do is they kind of have a very Christo-centric worldview, and they use the law to push all kinds of federal governments, state governments, as well as around the world, to adopt laws that basically legalize discrimination on religious grounds.
So a number of campuses have policies that basically say you can't have a student group that discriminates And so there'll be Christian groups that won't allow gay or LGBTQ people to join, and the school will say, you can't do that.
Like, you can't have a school group that is recognized by the school that prevents inclusion based on gender identity.
And the ADF will come in and sue the school in order to allow student groups to discriminate.
So what happens is you have a handful of students who have direct connection to this pipeline of money and legal support and media support that's able to turn what would otherwise be, without that political infrastructure, a localized issue into a national story.
That's one of my biggest points with this that I keep coming back to is I just think it's so easy to lose context.
And forgive me, because a lot of it is like, look, how important is the average college professor's Twitter habits to me?
You know, like either way, I mean obviously I don't want anyone to be discriminated against falsely or anything, but sometimes it's like even granting their version of events, let's say.
Like if you've got some, I don't know, administrator somewhere who's like, I am such a leftist, I am going to fire a professor for a conservative thing.
Like even if you grant all that, why do I know about that?
Like, why in the world is that news?
It'll often be some tiny college that affects, you know, what percentage of people does that actually affect?
And how often do we lose sight of the fact that, like, every single working person in this society has fewer rights than you would want?
You know, it's like, compare it to someone who works at Amazon, was a comparison I made when we were talking about the Killborn stuff.
It's like, they're really good, especially coming from conservatives, they're really good at making a huge stink about, like, "Academic freedom, he should be able to say racist things and it's fine, think about the blah, blah, blah, high-minded stuff." And then you're like, yeah, okay, if you work at an Amazon and you say the word union, they just fire you.
And like, those people don't give a shit, they support that kind of thing, 'cause they're conservative.
It's how often is it like, look, this isn't actually that important in the grand scheme.
Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't pay attention to it because they are weaponizing it.
So we need to fight back.
But oftentimes, because we love doing debunks, and I don't know if this is anything that anyone else says, but I started saying something like a context debunk.
Which is just like, even if true, who gives a shit?
Like this isn't something, relative to all the other issues going on, the only reason we're hearing about this particular student or this particular professor is because of this machinery that you're talking about.
That is important to keep in mind.
This isn't actually news 99% of the time.
That's exactly right.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
When a nothing becomes a something, there's a political infrastructure behind it.
So when a professor at a state school in Texas, when their Facebook page becomes a national story on Fox News, and it's not a story, there's nothing newsworthy there, and yet it takes up all this space and oxygen, and oftentimes can even move from the right-wing media ecosystem into the mainstream or actual media ecosystem.
And that's why I think it's really, really important to follow the money.
When you follow the money, who's funding campus reform?
Who's funding the Leadership Institute?
Who's funding Turning Points USA, right?
And you see it's a group of very, very active, very right-wing, primarily libertarian donors.
who have a very radical political ideology in which they don't think that the government should exist to fund state goods.
They don't think the government should fund things like public education.
They want to defund all kinds of public goods, and so delegitimizing higher education becomes one of the first steps in defunding higher education and defunding K-12 education.
Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute, a fellow who kind of manufactured the weaponization of critical race theory and all other kinds of things, right?
He recently said at Hillsdale College, and this is kind of a loose summary, but he said, you know, that universal school choice, referring to K-12, requires universal delegitimization.
If you want to defund K-12 schools and you want to turn them into voucher programs, then what you have to do is convince the public, which generally likes its schools according to Pew survey data, that they are actually bastions of corruption and indoctrination.
And as we demonstrate in our book, another goal that these donors have is that they have a long strategy that goes back for many decades to gain greater access into higher education.
So creating academic centers like those at George Mason, like the Mercantus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, They basically train students, they bring in students, they fund students, they oftentimes pay students to take classes on conservative ideas, and then identifies talent, conservative talent.
They call it a talent pipeline, and they call these institutions beachheads within the academy.
They're creating beachheads within the academy to both identify student talent and feed it into organizations like the Leadership Institute and think tanks and other kind of parts of the political infrastructure.
But also to create the ideas that then legitimize policies.
If you eventually want people, if you want judges to rule in ways that dismantle state regulation, what do you do?
You have a law school at George Mason, the Antonin Scalia Law School.
that's received tens of millions of dollars from the Charles Koch Foundation and other right-wing libertarian foundations and donors.
You hire a bunch of libertarian law professors who talk about the ways in which you need to apply free market principles to law and that law is also based on costs and benefits.
So what is the economic cost of a law?
And that needs to be taken into account.
And then what do you do?
You fly in federal judges to summer camps and you train them in this type of way of thinking about the law such that if you're a massive corporation or a polluter in front of the federal court or in front of the Supreme Court, there's a chance that you're sitting in front of a judge that has law journal articles there's a chance that you're sitting in front of a judge that has law journal articles that they can turn to because the infrastructure has paid for the scholars, the It's It has the talking points from the think tanks.
It has the media apparatuses and the broader think tank apparatus producing ideas that can then be used to justify certain legal decisions, not to mention the fact that you're hearing that case in front of the Supreme Court with six judges hand-selected by the Federalist Society, which is also part of the same infrastructure.
Right.
Yeah.
So that that idea is that in a way, the right and this kind of political infrastructure in general really understands the power of higher education.
But their vision of the higher education is not like giving individuals the autonomy to pursue ideas.
It's to manipulate it for their end.
Yeah.
And that's why a lot of these contracts and a lot of these centers, you know, I will give you this money in exchange.
You will hire this person or you will study only these particular ideas.
And it's not like your average college professor is rolling in dough.
So it's like the amount of money that the Kochs, or I guess there's only fortunately one of them left, that amount of money, I mean, I feel like it buys you, it must buy you an awful lot.
It does buy you an awful lot.
And especially if you understand an academic sitting around and writing academic articles, that may have an effect.
But if those academics writing those articles are also fellows at think tanks, and those think tanks have connections with judges and politicians, then there's a way in which these academic ideas that only exist because there's the dark money behind them can then have an influence, right?
Yeah.
I think about these academic centers as welfare states for mediocre libertarian ideas.
Yeah, that's a good way, too.
I always call it, it's the real affirmative action.
Yeah.
This idea that, like, for some of these students, I mean, very, very unexceptional students, if they take that conservative line on certain stuff, then they're on Fox News, and then they've got shows, and then, you know, there's a lot of that.
Yeah, Kat Timpf is one of them.
She's on Gutfeld, and she came from writing for Campus Reform.
You take the inverse, right?
There's this narrative that campuses are so woke.
Why is it now that you have professors writing pieces around structural racism or about the social construction of gender?
Why?
Because in the 60s and 70s, you had universities that were white, male, elite, almost exclusively, and you had groups of faculty of color, you have queer faculty, you have women faculty, you had faculty from the global South that were writing arguments
That we're critiquing the mainstream, widely held ideas within the academy and within the broader society, showing their limitations, pushing the intellectual bounds, and demonstrating, for example, that gender is socially constructed, or that a past history of slavery continues to affect the present.
Those ideas, I like, Nobody just woke up and said, whoa, I'm totally woke, you know?
Instead, those arguments won because they're better arguments.
If you look at the historical record, if you look at all the debates, you know, those are just better arguments.
And what happens is these white libertarians and those who want a traditionally Christian society are on the losing side of ideas that are better and they don't like it.
And so they're trying to combat it by dumping tons and tons of money into the university.
And to criticize, oftentimes ad hominem, those professors who say things that they don't like.
So instead of engaging with the ideas at the level of the ideas, they create these beachheads and these academic centers to produce ideas that are otherwise based on concepts and claims and ideas that are so laughably outdated.
That nobody would take them seriously because they're bad ideas.
Not because we're mean, woke, Marxist professors who don't like them.
Nobody would take those arguments seriously because they're bad arguments that have been disproven by mountains of evidence in the last few decades.
You mentioned gender as a social construct.
The study that you all did a couple years ago that we've been talking about, one of the pieces of information that you share is the primary topic of the faculty speech that led to the story in campus reform.
And the vast majority of the topics, you know, tended to be race, right?
I think it's 42 and a half percent of the folks that were targeted by campus reform, the primary topic was involving race.
23.7% election politics, 7.7% public health, makes sense, COVID-19, and then only 4.8% in gender.
And then, strikingly, at that time it was only 2.9% for the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
What are you seeing now, because you're continuing this work, and have those percentages changed or shifted at all?
Great.
I'll first talk a little bit about the survey.
So basically what we did in that survey was after 2020, I started monitoring campus reform in 2020.
And after 2020, we had a list of all the articles that were written by Campus Reform over the course of the year, and all of the articles that mentioned faculty.
And so we reached out, so we had this complete universe of people we could survey.
Jorg Teed from the AAUP contacted me and said, Hey, I'd really like to know what the effect of being written about by campus reform is.
So we put together a survey and we reached out to 100% of the faculty who had been written about in campus reform and had kind of an And we got about, I think it was a 63% response rate.
And the results of that were kind of quite surprising.
The ones you just mentioned about people being targeted primarily because of writing about race, the fact that more than 70% of stories were about social media and what was posted on social media.
The big top line number was that 40% of faculty who were written about by Campus Reform experienced threats of violence.
Imagine that.
Being written about by Campus Reform, 40% of the time led to receiving some sort of hate mail.
That hate mail oftentimes came in email, social media, but in a non-insignificant number of times was voicemails on office machines, sometimes handwritten letters.
And a number of the faculty that filled in kind of responses talked about the days that followed being written about as some of the worst days of their career.
That year, I know of three faculty members who lost their jobs following coverage and campus reform.
Now, the survey was taken at a particular period in time.
It was 2020, so kind of right in this kind of late Trump years and also the year of the Black Lives Matter protests.
And so I think that there was just a lot of stories that were written about race, a lot of stories that were written about COVID and COVID policies.
I was going to say also COVID, a lot of people had a lot of time to be mad.
Yep.
Yeah.
There's still a surprising number of people who have time to be mad.
It's quite shocking.
There's never a shortage, but just a little more than normal, I think, back then.
Yeah, but what we're seeing now is that the infrastructure stays the same and the topics change.
What you're seeing is, if I had to guess, there's a lot of stuff right now about gender ideology and the whole grooming narrative.
And that follows like a broader move within the right-wing media ecosystem where there's kind of a realization that talking about critical race theory had kind of run out of steam.
And so there was a shift to this kind of grooming narrative, right?
That there's faculty and K-12 educators who are out there that are turning your students or your children- Turning the frogs gay!
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, and that has been, like, not just like a weird talking point.
There's so much energy that's gone into writing about, quote, gender ideology, and these think tanks are just kind of pumping out so much material and kind of a moral panic about trans people as a response.
And then in that context, you also have the war in Gaza, And a lot of the conversation within the same outlets moves to a discussion of anti-Semitism, right?
So organizations that had never published much on anti-Semitism is now deeply, deeply concerned about the state of anti-Semitism.
Which is so funny when you have that connection with the white nationalists.
I know who I go to protect the rights of my Jewish friends.
It's Chex Notes, the group that chanted Jews shall not replace us in Charlottesville.
That's definitely the side.
That I want fighting that battle.
It just shows how much an argument of convenience it is at all times, you know, it's wherever.
They're really good at checking the pulse and finding what's actually resonating, you know, and I think trans stuff I think is really key for them because the argument of, hey, trans women would have an unfair advantage in sports, like that appeals to a broad swath of people and so they're good at using these little like introductory kind of arguments that like appeal broadly to Normies and then smuggling behind that a whole lot of really, really toxic crap.
Yeah.
I'll give you an example.
Riley Gaines, who lost swimming to Leah Thompson.
She's now funded by the Leadership Institute, the same organization that runs campus reform, as well as the Independent Women's Forum, which is this AstroTurf women's group that claims to stand up for women's rights.
It's kind of like a right wing, quote unquote, Yeah, that was the most lucrative fifth-place finish any female swimmer has ever had.
Yeah, but now she is a full-time provocateur who goes from campus to campus to campus and yells about how we need to protect Title IX and we need to protect women's sports.
Yeah, because she would have gotten fourth place in whatever that was had there not been a single trans competitor.
Yep.
Ridiculous.
Yeah, and now she's also in movies, you know, Lady Ballers.
The things we subject ourselves to.
Yeah.
I think she has like an entire program under one of those things, right?
It's like the Riley Gaines Center, blah, blah, blah.
I wish we had oil money.
Like, why doesn't our side have oil money?
I guess I answered my own question.
If only renewables gave us a bunch of vast wealth to like make a bunch of bullshit organizations.
I'll make you I'll make you president of something, by the way.
I'll give you just for coming on the show.
You can be.
You know what's so great is when you get one of these right-wing think tank people that is then getting the Bradley Foundation prize for blah blah blah.
So it's rich people giving money to do activism paid by rich people to get to achieve outcomes that only rich people want.
And yet they have these resumes that are filled with awards and accolades with articles published in journals that are funded by the same organizations.
You know, it's I think it's really important to remember that we don't actually want this kind of political infrastructure.
It's a deeply cynical view of the world in which those who have absolute plutocratic wealth claim the right based on their own wealth, and therefore they equate that with their own brilliance, to be able to determine how other people live.
You know, and the kinds of things that are politically valuable and the kinds of things that should guide our society and the rules and laws that we should have.
I think it's really important, though, to recognize how cynical this political project is and to not fall for it.
Because the more that we see something happening and say, oh, you know, did Claudine Gay actually plagiarize?
Well, you know, that's not the story, right?
The story is, what is the political infrastructure that led up to that moment?
Who is doing the political research that identified those plagiarism?
Spoiler alert, it's Christopher Rufo.
I know.
And that there's this broader political infrastructure.
We need to imagine a democracy in a world in which all people are included, in which the poorest among us can still participate in meaningful political and democratic action.
And we need to build that world.
And I really hope that those who have money and are willing to help build infrastructure in order to combat this right-wing political machine do so with the values not of, I'm the richest and therefore I'm the smartest and therefore let me do this project, but instead in a way that really listens to the people who are oftentimes the
the losers in the world that the Kochs and the Bradleys and the DeVosses and the Mercers and the Uliens and the, you know, all of those folks are building, which is a world that is not only headed towards climate disaster because they're fossil fuel producers, a lot of them, but is also one that uses all of this money to but is also one that uses all of this money to justify an economic system in which a very small number of people are recognized as the best people because they're
And it's unacceptable, it's disgusting, and it's absolutely shameful that this kind of political infrastructure has been so successful and that so much of the public, including journalists and my academic colleagues, fall for the talking points and the narratives and the stuff that they're putting out there.
We need to be very vigilant in calling it out, in following the money, and in making sure that we don't fall for these tricks.
Sounds like a woke communist thing to say.
Well, okay.
Lots more coming on Christopher Rufo, that's for sure.
I know we've been doing a lot of research on him too.
You kind of mentioned this, but CRT, you know, was that battleground for a while.
We're seeing DEI a lot in the spotlight right now.
Do you have predictions on kind of where it might be going next?
Do you think the idea of tenure is something that they're trying to tackle?
Absolutely.
So if you look at the very early CRT bills that were passed in 2021, Oklahoma, and I forget where the other first one was, they were very eclectic bills that oftentimes quoted the 1619 project.
By 2022, you're having language that's taken directly from the Trump executive order on racial stereotyping.
Which then became model legislation that was taken up by this group called Citizens Renewing America and the Heritage Foundation.
Both built model laws based on that Trump executive order.
And then CRT kind of became this, you know, those CRT bills looked a lot like what they call divisive concepts was the language that was used in those bills.
In 2022, you also have the Stock Woke Act in Florida, but also a bill in Tennessee.
And the Tennessee bill is really interesting because it really targets DEI specifically.
And then starting in 2023, the bills that are drawing on that same model language for divisive concepts increasingly include language about DEI.
The Manhattan Institute at that time produces its own model legislation written by Christopher Ruffo about DEI initiatives.
And so therefore the kind of attack on critical race theory moves into attack on DEI.
And the reason for this is that the critical race theory bills and the academic gag orders were really based on trying to change faculty speech.
So what can and can't be said first in trainings, and then those bills expanded to include classroom content.
And they were both not very popular because the American citizens were generally saying, hey, I don't want DeSantis telling me what can be said in the classroom.
But they were also not standing up under legal scrutiny for First Amendment and other reasons, right?
Justice Walker's decision against the Stop Woke Act in Florida is a great example where he calls it uniquely dystopian or something like that.
So what happened is the DEI bills are kind of an evolution that are really targeting the institutions themselves.
So instead of focusing on what a professor can or can't say in the classroom, they're now saying you can't have this kind of policy in place that gives preferential treatment to the hiring of minorities or that has a DEI office, you know, you're going to defund all DEI offices.
A lot of those bills actually refer back to the language that was passed in the CRT bills.
So you can't have a DEI office that does blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, C statute, whatever, whatever, which then refers you back to the CRT bill.
So they're kind of like a series of bills that are building off of each other.
But the bills that I'm seeing now, yeah, DEI was like an attack on the institution.
And then you're now seeing attacks on tenure, which is again, an effort to weaken those protections that protect faculty from external pressure.
And even more scary is attacks on accreditation.
DeSantis was trying to appoint His education secretary to, I think it was University of Florida, maybe Florida State, I don't remember.
The accreditor came in and said, hey, that looks bad to basically have your education secretary chair the board that's going to select himself as the president, right?
That looks bad.
And that may jeopardize your accreditation.
And after that, in Senate Bill 266, DeSantis included language that redid the accreditation.
So each school would have to choose a new accreditor every 10 years, which basically means that instead of having a body that says, hey, this looks dodgy, you might want to, you know, not do this dodgy stuff, that you're basically weakening the accreditation standards.
And that's Really scary, because what it means is that the institutions become more and more susceptible to external influence.
The ability to do that with accreditation started under DeVos when she was education secretary, and it's written into the Heritage Foundation's 2025 project.
Which is their kind of blueprint for what they're going to do at the federal level, should there be a Republican elected in 2024.
And it's basically completely gut the accreditations process.
So, I mean, I think that this culture war on higher education, the Republicans, they, you know, they see it as a political winner.
They're doubling down on it, and we're going to see even worse outcomes and even less protections for faculty, for staff, for students, and a larger efforts to kind of demand certain kinds of content in classrooms.
So, you know, there's a bill right now, a model bill that's come out by the National Association of Scholars and some other groups.
It's called the General Education Act, would basically take general education requirements and put them in a special college of a university Instead of you taking your general education class in the sociology or psychology or English department, you would take it in the School of General Education, and that School of General Education would have, and I shit you not, a Western civilization, almost exclusively curriculum.
Wow.
Where you're teaching the great white male history of America and European history and with very, very, very, very little exposure to anything other than great white philosophical tradition and the great white American tradition.
And it's really about kind of imposing a certain way of teaching.
So you're seeing a lot of those bills, too, where creating again, it's about rearranging the institution itself, right?
Creating the conditions in which certain donor and political operative preferred ideas are taught and other ideas that the donors and political operatives disagree with on political grounds, not intellectual grounds, are criminalized, are undermined, are demeaned, are mischaracterized, are criminalized, are undermined, are demeaned, are mischaracterized, are demagogued, and are turned into a moral panic.
Well, that sucks.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's Sorry, guys.
I vote no on that.
Yeah.
No, I don't know.
I'm fired up now, though.
So that's how I'm going to avoid feeling completely overwhelmed that they've been, you know, laying the seeds for this for decades and decades.
I think that's really important.
Like, they are where they are now because they've been doing it for decades and decades and they've been spending a ton of money doing it.
They're not where they are because their ideas are right or because they're good ideas or because there's, you know, historical backing to their hierarchical and supremacist notion of the way the world is organized.
They're on the wrong side of history and that's why you need the billionaires to prop up these ideas.
And so it's up to us to make sure that the plutocrats don't win.
Love it.
Any other final thoughts you want to share with us?
Anything that we didn't cover?
Yeah, just follow the money.
That's it.
Always be skeptical.
If something doesn't sound right, you know, if there's a center that's popping up at your school or there's an outlet that accuses a friend of yours of saying something and it doesn't sound right, follow the money.
It's incumbent upon us to keep doing the good work that's supported by data that's well-reasoned and well-researched and well-argued.
And it's also important to not just assume that these zombie ideas and these bad ideas are going to disappear if we ignore them.
We actually have to, unfortunately, engage, delegitimize, criticize, and actively, you know, demonstrate the hypocrisy.
And there are people who are doing it, but there's not enough of us doing it.
And I think it's really important for the public and for journalists and for the politicians to wake up and to kind of see the kind of political infrastructure that's behind what a lot of us had taken as common sense.
Right?
Like that professors are a certain way or that certain things are, you know, that universities are being organized in these ways that are totally crazy and insane.
If it doesn't seem right, it's probably not right, especially if there's a wealthy plutocrat who would gain by you thinking a particular way.
Yeah, great.
Thank you so much for taking the time to cover all of this stuff.
I imagine the audience is going to want to hear more because, yeah, it's a critical time, certainly, to be tackling all of these things.
Oh, yeah.
If you want to plug anything or send our listeners anywhere, your books, your website, social media, anything, throw it out there.
Sure.
Oh, thanks.
I would check out our book.
It's called Free Speech and Coke Money, Manufacturing a Campus Culture War with Ralph Wilson.
And I'd also check out the Faculty First Responders website.
I'm not a web designer, so it's not a pretty website.
I don't have a million dollar donor to do my tech stuff for me, but I think the information there is really good.
If there's something that's going on on your campus, a center or whatnot that seems fishy to you, shoot me an email.
I'm happy to look into it.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, my pleasure.
Let's do it again.
Chris Rufo deep dive.
Yeah, I was already working on that, but it feels like so, you know, it's so much.
When do you stop?
How do you stop?
Yeah, just advice.
How do you stop researching something?
When do you how do you get to the point where you're like, all right, now I can publish the thing that I was doing on it.
You know, do you have that issue?
That's a tough one.
Yeah, it is a tough one.
Usually a deadline maybe helps.
What if you have you make your own deadlines, you know, then?
