24 years? Really?
I was grateful, in this grim and gloomy week, for the laughs afforded by Evan Mandery’s story in Politico, “They Wanted a University Without Cancel Culture. Then Dissenters Were Ousted.” Yes, he’s talking about Bari Weiss’ University of Austin, TX scam -- which those of us who were paying attention knew was a rightwing boondoggle from the start, but Mandery and number of his interview subjects (mostly founders or early adopters who have skulked away) claim never to have seen it coming:
Because so many of its leaders lean conservative, UATX has been portrayed in some quarters as having been a right-wing project from the start. However, the truth is vastly more complex.
A land of contrasts, you might say! Mandry admits that the founders "leaned right," but says this was mitigated by the presence of Larry fucking Summers ("had served in Bill Clinton’s Cabinet and as Barack Obama’s chief economic advisor") and "unconventional, independent thinkers" like Jonathan Haidt. This was clearly not designed to recreate the School of Athens, yet Mandery professes surprise that sugar daddy Joe Lonsdale and several hardcore rightwing creeps have stripped away the Free & Fair Inquiry veneer of the thing and left it exposed as MAGA University.:
The ultimate irony is that UATX fell prey to the very impulses that its founders and supporters so detested. “It’s easy to see when other people lack these things,” [Ilana] Redstone said. “It’s harder to see in themselves.” Redstone hastens to add this isn’t just a failure at UATX. It’s fair to ask whether any university lives up to these ideas.
Any university! Not too many institutes of higher learning, from Harvard to Fritters Community College, devolve as quickly and as utterly as UATX has. Well, Florida’s New College did, once Ron DeSantis forcibly removed all the “woke” influences and made it into a conservative consent machine as well -- one that readily agreed to the Teach MAGA or Die demand that Trump has placed on all the big schools.
The allegedly “anti-woke but not rightwing” has in every instance turned out to be rightwing. It’s the institutional equivalent of Just The Tip Trumpers -- whether they were lying to con the rubes or to con themselves.
If only Trump’s own buffoonery were less consequential, we could enjoy that too. I’ve thought about exactly what's so annoying about his acceptance of Machado’s Nobel as if he had won it himself, and concluded that it's because this so perfectly reflects a signal aspect of Trumpism -- in a word, fraud, and by that I mean more than criminal fraud: I mean the impulse that leads Tubby to wreak havoc, for instance, among the armed forces with fraudulent tough-guy “warfighter” yak, and leads his incel creep followers to yammer about the values of Western Civilization when they’ve clearly only read the Classics Illustrated versions of the canon and don’t even understand those. That is, they are experts at nothing but fakery; so they must be wholly devoted to fraud and double down every time they’re challenged, as with their continued bullshit excuses for the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis. No wonder Tubby treats the pass-along of the Nobel as the same thing as earning it by his own actions -- why sweat it, he’s got people for that.
Speaking of Minneapolis, the ongoing rule by goon squad in the Twin Cities is the subject of this week’s ROY EDROSO BREAKS IT DOWN freebie -- it’s great that polls show the voters are catching on to the truth, but the Prestige Press is very slow about acknowledging that the administration’s lies have grown so threadbare that not even the most vapid institutionalist could possibly believe they must be respected in the court of public opinion (though not a few careerists may). The way to do it is the way Willamette Week does: By saying that ICE “asserted” something and “did not offer evidence to substantiate that account,” for example, rather than just doing steno for them.
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