14 Comments

I saw Bari Weiss on Bill Mayer a while back. She seemed smart and like a reasonable conservative with some ideas. I had no idea about this political movement of hers. Thanks for keeping us informed!

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I am also a staunch supporter of free speech. You wrote:

". . . a movement whose members believe that social change itself, and people who criticize them for their views, are threats to their free speech."

This belief and these movements are deeply rooted in religion. And yet very few among those fighting to save our democracy will directly, rather than obliquely, talk/write about this basic fact. Instead, they dance around the cause by focusing on the symptoms. Few are calling out the false claim of being silenced for what it really is: the social change itself you referenced that no longer conforms to a religious, fundamentalist world-view. And to rub salt into the wound, women are forced to subsidize their own subjugation via the tax-exempt status of religious groups.

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Tennessee school are accredited though teachers believe in actual spells & curses. Very very sad.

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Caring about We not Thee is the hallmark of right wing thought. More profoundly I think you are pointing to the culture of Blame that infects everyone in this society. It’s a perverse struggle for recognition that even our best freedom movements can fall prey to while the Right capitalizes on it and conservatives like Weiss and Katz build careers with it.

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I don't understand calling her a "contrarian". That basically accepts her framing of herself as an exile from orthodoxy, a free-thinking critic of conventional wisdom. It's like the branding of "Heterodox Academy", where the actual range of thought they showcase is narrow--running from conservative Democrats to centrist Republicans--and every 'debate' offers small variations in the same set of orthodoxies. Weiss isn't a contrarian, she's an ideologue of a very coherent orthodoxy.

The thing that's interesting about the UATX talk you describe here, though, is the central obsession with meritocracy, a concept that has been subject to very interesting and empirically grounded critiques from scholars and intellectuals who shade to the right as well as the left. Weiss isn't just about disinformation; she's also been consistently against anything that looks like genuine intellectual work, no matter who it comes from. In that sense, even the "Dark Enlightenment" figures that got her noticed in the first place are more studious or interested in ideas.

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