This is one of the most important things you will read today. It’s a Twitter thread by Boston University philosopher David Decosimo, laying bare the fundamental totalitarianism of contemporary academia. Read on:

Here’s the reality about the @DorianAbbot situation. What happened was an *aberration.*
Not the cancelling; Abbot being invited to begin with.

The hiring process in many places is now *deliberately designed* to keep an Abbot from ever getting a faculty job in the first place. 1/ https://t.co/hvQPmsGiVg

— David Decosimo (@DavidDecosimo) October 20, 2021

Here’s a link to the story about “citational justice.” It also includes the quote I cited earlier, from the Williams College paleontologist, saying that rigorous intellectual debate is a white thing.

Here is the passage in Live Not By Lies where I explain the totalitarianism of the kind of thing that has happened to Dorian Abbot:

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. Similar politically correct loyalty oaths are required at leading public and private schools.

More:

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship. The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

This is exactly what is happening in American academia. There are no gulags, or prisons; it is, for now, soft. But it is still totalitarianism. It is totalitarian when a distinguished scientists like Dorian Abbot is not allowed to give a talk about science at a leading American science and technology university because he doesn’t agree with leftist approaches to DEI. Prof. Romps at Berkeley discovered in trying to defend Prof. Abbot that his own academic institution is more interested in imposing political litmus tests than in defending science and academic inquiry.

As horrible as it is for this sort of totalitarianism to have conquered the humanities, it conquering STEM fields guarantees a Lysenkoist future for our country. Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who was profoundly wrong about genetics, but was politically correct, thus promoted by Stalin. This set back Soviet agricultural science greatly. It is impossible to do science if scientific inquiry is bounded by pointless ideological concerns. It is not pointlessly ideological to put ethical limits on, say, experiments on humans. But it is pointlessly ideological to blackball scientists like Dorian Abbot for ideological deviancy on DEI, or anything else non-scientific. Only a thoroughly corrupt academy could possibly support this kind of thing.

Here’s what I hope: that as we approach the 2022 elections, Republicans will make fighting soft totalitarianism their rallying cry, and propose specific policies for how to fight it. For example, universities that receive federal funding must abolish or radically overhaul their DEI programs, and establish mechanisms to prove that applicants for jobs are not subjected to these loyalty tests. Perhaps politicians, moving as they do in the world of elites, don’t quite understand how popular these proposals would be.

Look:

The Dorian Abbott situation is another example of the democratic deficit in American institutions. Elites treat racial preferences as something that shouldn’t be questioned while the majority of Americans oppose them. pic.twitter.com/IWCtY4YhRQ

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) October 20, 2021

Fighting back hard against this garbage in law would be popular! These are the same people, broadly speaking, who are trying to cancel Dave Chappelle, one of the most popular comedians in America, because he said that only biological women are truly women. You think Chappelle’s stance is controversial among most Americans? Surely you cannot be so dim.

Fight these people, while we still can! There are allies to be found everywhere. Among the most effective are public intellectuals of the anti-woke Left: Bari Weiss, Peter Boghossian, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, and their tribe. These people are not conservatives, but they understand better than most how destructive this totalitarian ideology is.

Yet as far as I can tell, no Republican lawmakers are launching a crusade on behalf of free speech and freedom of academic inquiry, and against the soft totalitarianism that rules academia and, increasingly, every institution in American society. Why is Bari Weiss braver and more aware of the left-wing ideological threat to the present and future of America than the GOP?

This has to change, while it still can change. There are gifted and intelligent men and women of all races in this country who are being kept out of the academy by these commissars. The commissariat must be destroyed, without fear or apology. The future of our country depends on it.

UPDATE: Financial Times report (quoted in Daily Mail, so outside of paywall) says China actually tested two hypersonic vehicles, which seem to defy the laws of physics. Wokeness in academia, especially in STEM, is now a direct threat to US national security. Come on, Republicans, wake up! Do something about this, while we still can. The DEI commissars must be totally sidelined.