The Antisocial Darwinist

One of the cruelest things about cancel mobs is that their victims generally suffer alone. Partially this is because the mob operates virtually (for the most part), such that most of one’s “real-life” friends and colleagues are only vaguely aware that anything is happening. But it’s more the case that the people who do know what’s going on are also — and rightfully — scared shitless of getting cancelled themselves. The mob operates in the classic “terrorist” mode — they achieve their political goals not by destroying specific enemies, but by creating spectacles that terrify their opponents into inaction. When Al-Qaeda crucifies a school teacher for collaborating with the Americans, nobody stands up against them even though they despise Al-Qaeda’s tactics and most of its beliefs; they’re too scared. Same with your academic colleagues when the mob comes from you. They privately, secretly express support, tell you how awful the cancellers are, but nobody wants to go through that shit.

Many of them are also in complete denial about how pervasive the problem is. People oppose the cancel mobs, but when they see a close friend or colleague subjected to one, they rationalize their inaction by telling themselves it’s a fluke, a local problem, and it will pass. But it’s not; it’s a system-wide plague. It also doesn’t just affect people on the right; even leftists who endorse positions considered heretical by the woke cathedral, such as feminists critical of the mob’s weird post-human transgender dogma, are at risk. This is obvious to those of us with a vested interest in following these trends due to our own heresies, but it has been unfortunately difficult to convince the broader public of the existence of the threat. The mob of course downplays everything; any one trying to call out their crimes is accused of being paranoid or spreading conspiracy theories. Rather like our ascendant Democrat commissars expressly deny the existence of the Antifa cells that do their wetwork for them — it’s all a figment of the right-wing imagination, and merely suggesting the existence of coordinated activity is probably evidence that you’re a white nationalist.

But all of that is hand-waving — “anecdata” as a scientist might scoff at a news article about some poorly sourced political hobby horse cause. My one experience with the mob, or even my knowledge of the handful of mob attacks that rise to sufficient prominence to be visible through the online noise, isn’t necessarily indicative of a real trend; I am admittedly subject to strong cognitive bias in favor of me being right and the mob being wrong, just as the mob and their head-in-the-sand facilitators have similar biases in the opposite direction. What is needed is actual data, systematically gathered, with an effort toward eliminating reporting bias. What percentage of academics, of various political self-identifications, have experienced discrimination, harassment, or violence from their peers because of their viewpoints?

Fortunately someone has done this study, and has recently published the results. Eric Kaufmann of the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology used a survey-based study administered to thousands of academics in the US, Canada, and the UK, ranging from grad students to retired professors, to assess the prevalence of political abuse of academics. Dr. Kaufmann used an innovative list experiment design to mitigate the effects of social desirability bias. His sample is also strongly biased towards left-leaning individuals — obviously, he surveyed academics — although he did also include members of the National Association of Scholars, a right-leaning advocacy group for traditional liberal values in education. So you can’t wave his results away by saying he only sampled people on the right.

Kaufmann’s results are disturbing, but they confirm the intuitions of those of us who have argued for the existence of a hostile climate for even center-right individuals in the academy. You should at a minimum read Kaufmann’s summary of his findings or his recent Quillette essay on the implications of his research, but I will include a few of his key findings here as well, along with my interpretation:

• 40% of academics say they wouldn’t hire a Trump supporter (thus, 75 million Americans, including millions of people from underrepresented minorities, are immediately excluded from consideration for employment)
• Only 10% of academics actively support the cancel culture, but over 50% tacitly support it by not opposing it. In other words, cowardice is rife, and tolerated, in academia.
• 70% of conservative academics report a hostile climate in their department, and 90% of Trump-supporting academics say they wouldn’t feel comfortable “coming out” about their politics to colleagues. Importantly 80% of UK academics who supported Brexit expressed the same reluctance — thus, you can’t cop out and blame Donald Trump for all of this. It represents a generic prejudice against mainstream right-wing attitudes prevalent in both the US and the UK and extending far beyond one brash politician.
• “…between a fifth and a half of academics would discriminate against the Right in grants, papers, or promotion bids. On a four-person panel, this means that the likelihood of a conservative encountering at least one biased assessor is pushing toward certainty.” Thus, the single-blind peer review system is incapable of providing a fair hearing for political dissidents, even in fields where the research is not obviously itself political.
• Younger academics are more likely to support defenestrating dissident academics, as I have observed elsewhere. Thus, the problem will only get worse as time goes by, unless we do something to correct course. Which is highly unlikely to occur given that:
• “A hostile climate plays a part in deterring conservative graduate students from pursuing careers in academia. Conservative and liberal graduate students differ far more in their perceptions of whether their politics fit academia than they do on questions related to how well academia pays, the isolating nature of the work, and other aspects of the profession.” I mean, duh, if I could have foreseen 2016 in 2010, I would be happily working for Monsanto right now. But more importantly, this finding show that all the efforts expended toward “diversity, inclusion and equity” have the opposite effect from what is advertised; DIE efforts are sold as beneficial because they theoretically increase the range of viewpoints and perspectives brought to the table, but in reality the offices that execute DIE policies restrict the range of viewpoints and perspectives. Remember that conservatives come in all colors, but none are welcome in the academy.

Hard numbers, supporting the worst conclusions of the dissident right. Somehow, this course of events has to be arrested. Imagine a world where science has become a tool of political advocacy — its output will no longer be trustworthy. Progress will grind to a halt. In all likelihood the corpus of accumulated knowledge will be corrupted as the literature is purged of wrongthink; and as everything must be political in a totalitarian state, no discipline will be immune from the “little men with big erasers, changing history”:

There has been a lot of discussion lately about what various people’s “Woke Breaking Point” was — what was the moment that ‘radicalized’ you on the threat posed by the woke mob? It’s clear there was some breaking point over the past 7 or 8 years where the insanity on campus metastasized and became a genuine threat to life and liberty, but it’s as difficult to pinpoint exactly when that transformation happened as it is to pinpoint the exact moment a tumor changes from a local irritation to a life-ending catastrophe. You can only estimate the time point based on its effect on phenotype — hence, we can ask, when did your average dissident reach their breaking point, and if we see that many reached that point at a certain key time, we can perhaps figure out what changed on a broader social level.

For me, the breaking point came in November 2014, when a mob of social justice warriors reduced scientist Matt Taylor to tears because he wore a tacky shirt on the day his fucking spaceship landed on a comet. I had been seeing this guy on social media for a few days because he was obviously photogenic — lots of tattoos, weird clothes, and obviously a genius — and he was closely connected to a truly amazing feat of scientific and engineering wizardry. Unsurprisingly I saw him as “one of my people” — a countercultural weirdo who had gained a foothold in the academic world despite not fitting the stereotypical physical model of the “eminent scientist”. Not only that, he’s almost exactly the same age as me and he’s apparently also a metalhead (his Wikipedia article mentions Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse, fuckin awesome). But where he should have been greeted with accolades, he was instead greeted with a Twitter mob because he wore a Hawai’ian shirt with Barbarella-style sci-fi babes on it. Within 24 hours he was reduced to a tearful and humiliating apology for his (completely awesome) wardrobe choice, which of course did him no good. Looking just now I couldn’t find any information about where he’s at now — which means he’s either been drummed out of science or else demoted to invisibility. In other words, cancelled.

Remember, fellow dissidents: never fucking apologize. Never bend the knee to these savages — once the mob comes, your fate is sealed for better or for worse, and your only choice is whether to go out looking like a crying chump, or to keep your chin high and provide a role model for the next poor bastard.

So the shear injustice of what happened to Taylor — and, for 2014 me, its suddenness and unexpectedness — woke me up to what was going on. This guy was basically a better version of me, and if they could ruin him in a day, what could they do to me? Within less than a week of Taylor’s cancellation, I spent my 40th birthday having dinner with fellow academics — I have detailed the experience previously on this blog — and experienced an epiphany of sorts. Basically, I had been underestimating the degree of prejudice and outright hate in academia toward people like me. I felt sick to my stomach — as I recall I was unable to finish my meal. Partially the issue was a feeling of looming threat, but more than that was this sudden, cataclysmic deflation of the respect I had previously felt for so many people. I remember having a similar feeling when the whole steroid scandal broke in baseball — this whole world that I had previously had an almost worshipful respect of was a fucking scam, and not only that, it was leaking its poison into the rest of society. In other words, not only was my profession compromised, it was the source of a great evil — and by keeping my mouth shut about it, I was complicit.

So I pretty much decided to suck it up and not be afraid of the mob. I don’t think I would have been capable of being quiet even if the sensible part of my conscience had wanted it. In fact, this whole recollection was inspired by a quote I read from James Watson — quoted by Steve Sailer in his book review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the brilliant Jennifer Doudna:

“I think my blunt and contrary nature helps my science, because I don’t simply accept things just because other people believe it,” he says. “My strength is not that I’m smarter, it’s that I’m more willing to offend the crowd.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much me — I have maybe even more in common with Watson than with Taylor. Well, they cancelled Watson too, but it doesn’t make him wrong. My understanding of my own thinking suggests that my contrariness has always been the source of my skill in science, but of course it’s not the sort of thing one can turn on and off. I’m simply not capable of lying about anything important, even when society demands it. Matt Taylor’s shirt was cool. Jim Watson was right. And the people who cancelled them are boring and evil and can go fuck themselves.

I’m going to present a story today that’s a bit out of character for most reporting on cancel culture. In 2021 we’ve all become used to reports of right-leaning academics being harangued, punished, and even sacked by their employers after being targeted by Internet mobs, so my personal story isn’t much of a surprise. And if we’re fair, there’s also a history of conservative cancel culture as well, with academic supporters of abortion rights, LGBT equality, and other liberal positions facing sanctions from their universities doing damage control after getting bad press – so that side of the story won’t shock you either. But what we’re most certainly not used to seeing is a university facing multiple cancel culture efforts from both sides of the aisle in quick succession and actually taking a principled stand in favor of the free speech rights of all of their employees. But that’s what happened at my university, the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) – and I am writing this to encourage UAB’s administration to capitalize on their difficulties, and in so doing make a lot of money while setting an example for the revitalization of academic culture in the United States.

My part of the story began in earnest in August 2019. As my long-time readers know, I’m an odd duck – a right-leaning biology professor – but like many of my fellow Americans, I watched in a combined mood of disgust and incredulity as mainstream Democrats competed with each other over that summer to see who could “own” Donald Trump and his supporters the hardest. He was operating concentration camps on the borders. He was a secret Russian spy. He was in the pocket of shady corporate interests. And the coup de gras – Trump, like all of his supporters, was a white nationalist. By summer 2019, the media’s intentional conflation of the populist, civic-nationalist movement that elected Trump with American History X-style neo-Nazis had reached a fever pitch. Attending several academic conferences over the summer, I had heard a number of academics – mostly from the youngest cohorts – openly referring to Trump and his supporters as “white nationalists” or “white supremacists” or even “Nazis”. The situation on Twitter was even worse – prominent tenured biologists were displaying full-blown symptoms of “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, where every problem in the news became an excuse to smear Trump’s movement as some kind of Hitlerian jihad against democracy.

Being a Trump supporter myself, I couldn’t help but take this inchoate abuse from my colleagues – many of whom were supposedly also my friends – personally. I had been an early endorser of the use of Twitter for academic purposes, but at some point around 2014 I decided that I had a responsibility to be a public advocate for the rural-born, religion-supporting libertarian/Republican minority in my profession. I wrote about my heterodox positions both on this blog and on Twitter, and had stimulated a few pretty interesting discussions over the years that I like to believe left both my interlocutors and me more informed and more tolerant than we were beforehand. Concerned about the rising tide of intolerance in academic biology in August 2019, I took to Twitter to decry what I saw as a “white nationalist panic”, where the prevalence of white nationalism was disingenuously inflated and the threat posed by the movements that actually existed grossly exaggerated. I wrote a blog expanding on my positions, speculating what the motives could be of those stoking the panic – from my perspective, it certainly looked like the goal was to dehumanize the political opponents of the Democrats as a first step toward justifying violence and repression against them.

I feel strongly that the course of US history since August 2019 supports the position I took, but at the time it was – unpopular. A Twitter mob sparked by a few serial harassers led to my blog post going viral, and by the next day an unknown number of activists were contacting the UAB administration demanding I be fired. Over the ensuing months these “progressive” activists managed to derail one of my funded projects and tried to derail the rest. The campus “journalists” dug up 20-year old Livejournal essays (from my phase as a black metal guitarist, years before I got into research) and used out-of-context quotes to support their narrative that I was a “literal Nazi”. One of my chief mentors essentially disowned me, calling me “autistic” and one of the two worst people he had ever known. And one of my younger collaborators decided (in a Skype call where, no shit, she was literally shaking) that she could no longer associate with me, refusing to do the work we had been funded to do and basically absconding with half a million dollars of US taxpayer money out of political spite. But despite all of that, UAB refused to take any action against me at all. My teaching, scholarship, research, and committee service at UAB were completely unaffected.

To say that I was surprised by the university administrators’ response would be a gross understatement. But I was even more surprised given that, just a few months earlier, a graduate student from my department had been doxed as a member of an actual white nationalist organization, Identity Europa. In the end the sum total of his “crimes” was saying insensitive, politically incorrect things on a forum that wasn’t as anonymous as he thought it was – and in the wake of enormous public outcry, the administration publicly supported his freedom of speech rights as well. We’re used to these sorts of stories ending with the cancellation of the thought criminal, but this kid survived thanks to UAB’s refusal to violate its academic principles to placate the mob. He defends his PhD dissertation this year, and has his whole life ahead of him, hopefully including more moderate politics as he ages – but how do you think his attitudes and beliefs would have been affected if the mob had succeeded in defenestrating him?

Fast-forward to 2020 and the troubles start up again on campus, but this time coming from the other side of the political aisle. Sarah Parcak, a well-known archaeologist from UAB’s anthropology department, decided it would be a good idea to use Twitter to give BLM rioters detailed instructions on how to efficiently destroy obelisk monuments. Parcak posted these tweets on May 31, 2020, while a mob of “protesters” were actively trying to pull down the controversial Confederate obelisk monument in Birmingham’s Linn Park – an effort that, had it been successful, would probably have killed or severely injured several people. The “protest” later turned into a full-blown riot, similar to what many other cities experienced that week. UAB had nothing to say about those tweets, as I recall, despite the fact that they came pretty close to crossing the “yelling fire in a crowded theater” red line. But when Parcak was back in the news last week, tweeting that she hoped Rush Limbaugh “suffered until his last breath”, UAB’s president Ray Watts unloaded on her:

Parcak’s tweet about Limbaugh, in combination with her past few months of incendiary comments about conservatives, drew the attention of the Alabama GOP, whose chairwoman Terry Lathan called for her to be fired. A conservative cancel-culture mob at least as big as the leftist one that came for me mobilized against Parcak. But UAB again held its ground, defending her right to free speech just as it had defended me in 2019. Here’s a quote from the statement they released on Tuesday:

“We recognize our employees’ rights to free speech… As an institution of higher education that encourages civil discourse, we understand differing opinions regarding our position in defense of our shared values: integrity, respect, diversity and inclusiveness, collaboration, excellence and achievement, stewardship, and accountability…Our shared values are consistent and do not change with political viewpoints in any direction.

Last week — as we did in 2019 when UAB publicly acknowledged that three members of the campus community were identified as either having been associated with a white supremacist organization and/or having made racist statements in personal online posts — we recognized the community’s concerns, spoke out in defense of our shared values and committed to looking into the matter.

UAB follows policies, procedures, and state and federal laws, and recognizes individuals’ constitutionally protected rights to free speech. This responsibility applies even when speech is counter to the vision, mission and values we champion.”

I could quibble about the University’s response, of course. The administration basically called me a racist and an extremist – given that I have yet to find a person who identifies as “on the right” who found anything amiss about my 2019 comments, I’m skeptical that either of those statements is even close to true. And the University certainly didn’t do anything to counter the assumption amongst some casual observers that the Identity Europa kid and I are the same person or that we are somehow engaged in a Nazi conspiracy to brainwash students. I also take offense to the suggestion that what I did is comparable to what Parcak did. I was taking substantial personal and professional risks trying to get my colleagues to moderate their positions, hoping that their affection for me as a person and their respect for me as a scientist would lead them towards a position of tolerance for the conservative half of the American population to which I belong. In contrast, Parcak was one of the bad actors enthusiastically pouring gas on the fire. But these complaints are perhaps overly picky; given the nightmares that other cancelled professors have described, UAB’s response has been nearly impeccable.

The one real complaint I have is that UAB isn’t capitalizing on this succession of controversies. UAB didn’t ask for any of this to happen, but it did happen nonetheless, and the university has already weathered cancel culture mobs from both sides at this point. Probably the administration is just hoping it will all go away, but in my view, that’s a waste of a perfectly good crisis. The worst is over, and the truth is that UAB has taken a principled stand three times now under heavy public scrutiny, and that puts it in an extremely small category of universities that have demonstrated through their actions a commitment to free speech. They might as well go ahead and take the next step – become “the Free Speech University” and market the controversy. “Look how vile Parcak’s tweets are! But we support her unconditionally because she does good science.” “Look at how we protected this grad student! Nothing you will ever say will be worse than what he said, and he did okay.” “We have a Republican biology professor! Who else can say that?” We would be a nearly unique commodity, and the tens of millions of parents (like me) who are seriously considering not sending their children to the toxic woke hell of a 2020s university would immediately look to UAB as a solution to their problem. And, as impotent tears flowed from the loud, intolerant fringes of society, tuition dollars would flow into our endowment like manna from Enlightenment heaven.

UAB could firmly place itself into this lucrative Free Speech niche by taking one simple action, which is merely a re-framing of actions they have already taken. They should change their focus from protecting the free speech rights of students and faculty to attacking the legitimacy of the mobs demanding our heads. The issue isn’t that people shouldn’t push back against Parcak and me – they should! No, the issue is that some people want us fired, ostracized, and basically kicked out of human society for holding different values. All civilized people – and especially academics – should reject that response unconditionally. UAB should double-down on its dedication to its shared values of civility, integrity, and collaboration, and declare that it will never allow itself to be bullied by any pressure group, no matter how large or how righteous, into firing any of its employees, from the Provost to the overworked adjuncts to the cafeteria dishwasher, for speaking their mind in public. UAB shouldn’t get bogged down in addressing whether or not what Parcak or I said is ‘over the line’ – they should turn the tables and go on the offensive against the forces of intolerance that want to force us to shut up.

I have no idea if my bosses will read this or take my suggestion to heart, but I hope they do. The alternative would seem to be that this back-and-forth riposte of dueling cancel culture mobs will continue, contributing to an ever-deteriorating university experience for everyone involved. Maybe they will continue no matter what we do, but I have to imagine that if nobody ever fed the mobs, they would eventually disband. Maybe we can’t change the entirety of US campus culture by ourselves, but I’m telling you, we can try, and I bet we can make a lot of money in the process.

I had the pleasure of talking with Dale Jackson again yesterday on his morning radio show. We talked about how things have gone for me in the aftermath of my 2019 “cancellation” as well as our feelings about the Sarah Parcak controversy, which has caused the usual suspects to start clamoring for my head on a stick again. Here, for your listening enjoyment: