by Ben Shapiro
It’s not only that conservatives have been weeded out at America’s top universities. It’s that even old-school, rights-based liberals have now been marginalized. Former head of the American Civil Liberties Union Ira Glasser recently told Reason about visiting one of America’s top law schools:
[T]he audience was a rainbow. There were as many women as men. There were people of every skin color and every ethnicity . . . it was the kind of thing we dreamed about. It was the kind of thing we fought for. So I’m looking at this audience and I am feeling wonderful about it. And then after the panel discussion, person after person got up, including some of the younger professors, to assert that their goals of social justice for blacks, for women, for minorities of all kinds were incompatible with free speech and that free speech was an antagonist. . . . For people who today claim to be passionate about social justice to establish free speech as an enemy is suicidal.45
But the suicide of the academy is well under way. Even moderate liberals now find themselves on the chopping block. When liberal professor Bret Weinstein refused to leave the Evergreen State College campus after black radicals demanded that white teachers not teach on a particular day—and when he added to that sin by stating that faculty jobs should be rooted in merit rather than skin color—authoritarian leftist students called him racist and took over campus buildings.46 Students walked out on a class taught by his wife, evolutionary biologist Heather Heyer, when she pointed out that men are, on average, taller than women.47 Professor Nicholas Christakis and his wife, Erika, were shouted out of their positions as Yale faculty-in-residence at Yale’s Silliman College after Erika committed the grave sin of asking students to be less sensitive about Halloween costumes. Students confronted Nicholas on the quad and screamed at him. “Who the f*** hired you?” screamed one black female student. “You should step down! . . . It is not about creating an intellectual space! It is not! Do you understand that? . . . You are disgusting!”48
Such incidents have terrified dissenters into silence or, worse, compliance. But it’s not just student intimidation at issue. It’s the self-perpetuating nature of the New Ruling Class at our universities. According to sociologist George Yancy, 30 percent of sociologists openly admitted they would discriminate against Republican job applicants, as well as 24 percent of philosophy professors; 60 percent of anthropologists and 50 percent of literature professors said they would discriminate against evangelical Christians. But just as important, once wokeism has been enshrined as the official ideology of higher education, conservatives self-select out of that arena. How often will a dissertation adviser take on a PhD student in political science who posits that individual decision making rather than systemic racism lies at the root of racial inequalities? How often will a college dean hire an associate professor who maintains that gender ideology is a lie? As Jon Shields, himself an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, notes at National Affairs, “the leftward tilt of the social sciences and humanities is self-reinforcing.”49
CONCLUSION
The religion of the New Ruling Class—as well as the ritualistic pagan activities surrounding it—is an intellectual virus. And it has infected broad strains of American life. In fact, wokeism is so incredibly virulent that in February 2021, French president Emmanuel Macron stated that the country’s unity was threatened by “certain social science theories imported from the United States.” Macron’s education minister warned that the “intellectual matrix from American universities” should not be imported.50
For decades, conservatives scoffed at the radicals on campus. They assumed that real life would beat the radicalism out of the college-age leftists. They thought the microaggression culture of the universities would be destroyed by the job market, that paying taxes would cure college graduates of their utopian redistributionism, that institutions would act as a check on the self-centered brattishness of college indoctrination victims.
They were wrong.
Instead, wokeism has been carried into every major area of American life via powerful cultural and governmental institutions—nearly all of which are composed disproportionately of people who graduated from college and learned the wokabulary. Growth industries in the United States are industries dominated thoroughly by college graduates. In fact, between December 2007 and December 2009, the Great Recession, college graduates actually increased their employment by 187,000 jobs, while those with a high school degree or less lost 5.6 million jobs. Over the course of the next six years, high school graduates would gain a grand total of just 80,000 jobs during the so-called Obama recovery, compared to 8.4 million jobs for college graduates.51
Instead of postgraduation institutes shaping their employees, employees are shaping their institutions. It turns out that corporate heads and media moguls are just as subject to renormalization as colleges ever were. As we will see, corporate titans are now afraid of their woke staff, and have turned to mirroring their priorities; old-school liberals in media have turned over their desks to repressive wokescolds; even churches have turned over their pulpits, increasingly, to those who would cave to the new radical value system.
One area of American life, though, should have been immune to the predations of authoritarian leftism: science. After all, science has a method, a way of distinguishing truth from falsehood; science is designed to uncover objective truths rather than to wallow in subjective perceptions of victimization. Science should have been at the bleeding edge of the pushback.
Instead, science surrendered, too. Next, we’ll take a look at why.
Chapter 4
How Science™ Defeated Actual Science
Two thousand twenty was a banner year for science.
In the midst of a global pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus, scientists in laboratories across the world stepped into the breach. They researched the most effective methods of slowing the virus’s spread. They developed new therapeutics designed to reduce death rates, and researched new applications of already-existent drugs. Most incredibly, they developed multiple vaccines for Covid-19 within mere months of its exponential spread across the West. Most of the West didn’t shut down until March 2020. By December, citizens were receiving their first doses of vaccine, immunizing the most vulnerable and flattening the infection curve.
Meanwhile, in hospitals, doctors and nurses labored in perilous conditions to care for waves of the sick. Physicians were called upon to be resourceful with limited resources; nurses were called upon to brave danger to themselves to treat others. As they learned more about the nature of the disease, those medical workers saved tens of thousands of lives.
And the public took measures, too. Across the West, citizens socially distanced and masked up; they closed their businesses and took their children out of school and told their parents to stay home in order to protect others.
The historic scourge of disease challenged humankind. Science emerged victorious.
And yet.
While laboratory scientists did unprecedented work creating solutions for an unprecedented problem, while doctors worked in dangerous conditions to preserve the lives of suffering patients, public health officials—the voices of The ScienceTM, the politically driven perversion of actual science in the name of authoritarian leftism—proceeded to push politically radical ends, politicize actual scientific research, and undermine public trust in science itself. Unfortunately, because science is such an indispensable part of Western life—it is perhaps the only arena of political agreement left in our society, thanks to the fact that it has heretofore remained outside the realm of the political—it is too valuable a tool to be left unused by the authoritarian Left. And so the authoritarian Left has substituted The ScienceTM for science.
Science itself is a process of gathering knowledge through painstaking trial and error, through gradual development of a body of knowledge through observation and data collection, through falsification. Science requires that we believe in objective truths about the world around us, an
d that we believe in our own capacity to explore the unknown to uncover those truths. Most of all, science provides the final word where it speaks.
The ScienceTM is a different story. The ScienceTM amounts to a call for silence, not investigation. When members of the New Ruling Class insist that we follow The ScienceTM, they generally do not mean that we ought to acknowledge the reality of scientific findings. They mean that we ought to abide by their politicized interpretation of science, that we ought to mirror their preferred solutions, that we ought to look the other way when they ignore and twist science for their own ends. The ScienceTM is never invoked in order to convince; it is invoked in order to cudgel. The ScienceTM, in short, is politics dressed in a white coat. Treating science as politics undermines science; treating politics as science costs lives. That’s precisely what the authoritarian Left does when it invokes The ScienceTM to justify itself.
We saw The ScienceTM prevail over science itself repeatedly during the pandemic, to ugly effect.
Perhaps the most robust finding with regard to Covid—a finding replicated across the globe—was that large gatherings involving shouting and singing were inherently more dangerous than sparsely populated, socially distanced situations. The media quickly seized on this fact, for example, to chide anti-lockdown protesters for their irresponsibility, claiming that even outdoor protests could be unsafe.1 Meanwhile, local officials in many areas went beyond the science itself, closing beaches, hiking trails, and even public parks—areas that were in no way chief vectors for transmission.2 Republicans who refused to close beaches in largely unaffected areas, like Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, were heavily criticized.3 All of the pro-lockdown policy and rhetoric was justified with appeals to science.
As it turned out, public health officials weren’t concerned about science. They were merely using science as a tool to press for their preferred policies. They were, in short, more interested in The ScienceTM than in science itself.
That became perfectly clear at the end of May.
On May 25, George Floyd, a forty-six-year-old black man, died in the custody of Minneapolis police. Floyd was a career criminal with a serious record; the police were called because he had passed a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill while buying cigarettes; his autopsy found that he had a “fatal level” of fentanyl in his system. Selectively edited tape of Floyd on the ground for nearly nine minutes, saying he couldn’t breathe as a police officer put his knee on the back of Floyd’s neck, went viral. The officer restraining Floyd was charged with second-degree murder.
Floyd’s death generated massive protests and riots around the country. Those protests and riots were driven by the false notion that police across the nation routinely murdered black men—an evidence-free untruth.4 Led by the radical Black Lives Matter movement, these “racial justice” gatherings—in the midst of a deadly pandemic—were unprecedented in size and scale. According to polling, somewhere between 15 and 26 million people in the United States attended a protest.5 The protests were certainly not socially distanced; some wore masks, but certainly many did not. Often, the protests devolved into violence, including mass looting and property destruction; major cities across America were forced to declare curfew for the law-abiding. More often, the protests turned into party-like atmospheres, including dancing and singing and shouting.
And the same public health professionals who decried anti-lockdown protests, who urged Americans to do their part to socially distance, who cheered as businesses were told to close and schools to board up, ecstatically endorsed the mass gatherings. Apparently, the virus was itself woke: it would kill Republicans who opposed economy-crippling lockdowns, but would pass over anyone chanting trite slogans about defunding the police.
Politicians from the Left—devotees of wokeism—appeared in the midst of mass protests personally. Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) attended a civil rights march in Highland Park with hundreds of others, standing “shoulder-to-shoulder with some march participants.” She did so just days after explaining that protests could in fact endanger lives.6 Even as the National Guard policed Los Angeles in the wake of widespread rioting and the law-abiding were confined to their homes, Mayor Eric Garcetti took a knee with the Black Lives Matter crowd and “pulled down his blue Los Angeles Dodgers face mask to speak.”7 Speaking on CNN, New York mayor Bill de Blasio openly stated that only BLM marches would be allowed in his city: “This is a historic moment of change. We have to respect that but also say to people the kinds of gatherings we’re used to, the parades, the fairs—we just can’t have that while we’re focused on health right now.”8
Leaving aside the First Amendment implications of such statements, none of this could be remotely justified by the science itself. But authoritarian leftist politicians could count on members of the public health establishment to back their play, manufacturing anti-scientific narratives in the name of science. More than one thousand “public health specialists” signed an open letter supporting the largest protests in American history in the middle of a global pandemic, claiming that such protests were “vital to the national public health,” and adding, “This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-at-home orders.” Infectious-disease expert Ranu S. Dhillon of Harvard Medical School told The New York Times, “Protesting against systemic injustice that is contributing directly to this pandemic is essential. The right to live, the right to breathe, the right to walk down the street without police coming at you for no reason . . . that’s different than me wanting to go to my place of worship on the weekend, me wanting to take my kid on a roller coaster, me wanting to go to brunch with my friends.”9
The social science simply does not support the contention that the police are, writ large, targeting Americans of color based on racial animus. But even if such a wild accusation could be substantiated, it is absolutely absurd to suggest that mass protests over such a systemic issue—protests capable of spreading a highly transmissible deadly disease—represent a net positive for public health. Yet precisely that contention became commonplace in the world of The ScienceTM.
Julia Marcus, epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, and Gregg Gonsalves, epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health, penned an article at The Atlantic claiming, “Public-health experts are weighing these same risks at a population level, and many have come to the conclusion that the health implications of maintaining the status quo of white supremacy are too great to ignore, even with the potential for an increase in coronavirus transmission from the protests.”10
The University of California, San Francisco, hospital gave doctors of color a day off after Floyd’s death; many of those doctors joined protests. One, Dr. Maura Jones, explained, “I would argue that, yeah I’m a doctor and I encourage you to social distance and I care about coronavirus and I know that it’s a real threat, but racism is, to me to my family, the bigger threat right now and it has been for hundreds of years.” Dr. Jasmine Johnson joined a protest by the University of North Carolina Student National Medical Association with a sign reading, “Racism is a pandemic too!” She claimed that racism was the root cause of racial disparities in death statistics from Covid—and therefore suggested that protest was actually a public health good.11 Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, made the most insane case of all: that the protests would fuel Covid spread, but that this didn’t matter. “Do I worry that mass protests will fuel more cases? Yes, I do. But a dam broke, and there’s no stopping that,” he stated.12 Based on The ScienceTM, liberal figures in government began promoting declarations that racism represented a “public health crisis.”13
The science said that gathering in large numbers was a bad idea. To that end, thousands of Americans watched from afar as parents, brothers and sisters, family and friends died alone in hospitals; funerals were held by Zoom. Businesses shut by the hundreds of thousands.
The ScienceTM said that health concerns were secondary, and political concerns
were primary.
And then our scientific establishment wonders why Americans have trust issues.
As it turned out, we may never know whether the mass protests spread Covid. We do know that the summer saw radical increases in viral transmission—increases the media quickly chalked up to Memorial Day gatherings, which occurred the same week protests broke out. But cities like New York actually told their contact tracers not to ask whether those diagnosed with Covid had attended a protest.14
The public health community’s willingness to extend its area of supposed expertise to problems of alleged racial injustice highlights one very serious problem for the scientific establishment: the Ultracrepidarian Problem. Ultracrepidarianism is weighing in on matters outside one’s area of expertise, or pretending that one’s area of expertise extends to questions in different subject areas. Suffice it to say, our public health experts—and the doctors who weigh in on the political matter of policing and race relations—are certainly operating in uncharted waters for them. Simply slapping the label “science” on a political opinion doesn’t make that opinion scientific any more than calling a man a woman makes that man a biological woman. The Ultracrepidarian Problem extends the reach of science into areas of pseudo-science, claiming the mantle of the objective and verifiable on behalf of subjective conjecture.
There is a second related, perhaps even more serious problem for scientific institutions in the United States, however: what we can call the Bleedover Effect. Whereas the Ultracrepidarian Problem comes from the scientific community speaking outside its area of expertise, the Bleedover Effect occurs when outside political viewpoints bleed over into scientific institutions themselves. This, predictably, restricts the actual reach of science, supplanting anti-scientific ruling ideologies for scientific inquiry.