What’s wrong with the American left? Suffering from Trump anxiety disorder, acting like cult members, and engaging in a new McCarthyism, the left has lost its collective mind. I saw it coming and left the left in the nick of time. (Originally published on RT.com. November 12, 2019.)
In June, whistleblower Zach Vorhies dumped internal Google documents exposing the company’s shady practices and political agenda. Rather than investigate, US lawmakers are offering Big Tech political cover and a legislative decoy. (Originally published on RT.com. November 10, 2019.)
“Big Digital” consists of an array of business, political, and social interests, an ensemble of technology companies and Internet services, including but not limited to the Big Four: Alphabet (Google, YouTube, etc.) Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. Big Digital wields enormous economic and political power, presiding over Big Data, and serving as the chief arbiter of expression, with the power to effect the digital deletion of “dangerous” persons from its various platforms, as the gulag was the means to physically disappear dissidents and other thought criminals from “normal” life in the Soviet Union.
Criticism of political correctness was supposed to be the exclusive province of the rightwing. For most observers, it was almost inconceivable that an anti-P.C. critic could come from another political quarter. Unsurprisingly, then, the majority of people who discovered my case, including some reporters, simply assumed that I was a conservative. As one Twitter troll put it: “You’re anti-P.C.? You must be a rightwing nut-job.” Click here or on title.
Michael Rectenwald was a professor at New York University who described himself as a full blown Communist. But when he committed the mortal sin of [against] collectivism, which is to question the wisdom of the party line…The process was enlightening because it allowed Professor Rectenwald to see that leftist ideology is merely a “velvet glove that covers an iron fist.” Click on here or on title.
Obviously, I had by now known and accepted the premise that English Studies was a battlefield of “textual politics,” and that the players made no bones about their agendas. Previously, critics in the field, like the old New Critics with their plodding close reading of texts, had pretended to be neutral, but their neutrality was merely a thin scrim for cultural domination. Dead white men had ruled the English canon long enough. But this was only the most flagrant of offenses. Click here or on title.
In The Supreme Object of Ideology, the Slovenian Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek, following the French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, makes this claim and calls the central, organizing element le point de capiton, or the “quilting point,” the “anchoring point,” the element that holds an ideology together and around which a consistent perspective can be maintained.
Had my dad understood it, my graduate school enrollment in “Literary and Cultural Theory” would have struck him as tantamount to madness, like self-commitment to an insane asylum….By then, my father had been considerably reduced, physically and cognitively, by a series of strokes. I no longer had to answer to him, even if I wanted to. So, twelve years after the Ginsberg apprenticeship and after working in broadcast advertising for nine years, by my early thirties, I finally decided to become a literature professor. Click here or on title.
On September 12, 2016, I established a Twitter account with the name “Deplorable NYU Prof” and the official handle @antipcnyuprof. This Twitter identity – replete with Friedrich Nietzsche avatar – represented a satirical character wielded by a self-proclaimed but anonymous NYU professor apparently gone rogue. As with all satire, the mockery was over-the-top, but the intended effect was serious criticism. The Twitter account allowed me to air views that I felt reluctant to issue under my real name, and to render them without undue circumspection. Click here.
Some major corporations now intervene in social and political issues and controversies, partaking in a new corporate activism. The newly “woke” corporations support activist groups and social movements, while adding their voices to political debates. Woke capitalism has endorsed Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo Movement, contemporary feminism, LGBTQ rights, and immigration activism, among other leftist causes… (The Ludwig von Mises Memorial Lecture, sponsored by Yousif Almoayyed, was delivered at the Mises Institute on March 22, 2019. The video of the talk can be found here. (Published in The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Volume 22, No. 2 pp. 122–138, Summer 2019. Click here or on title.)
Despite its loosely aggregated elements, social justice is arguably the hegemonic paradigm for teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences today. Yet, some scholars have been subjecting the “social justice university” to trenchant criticism, and Heterodox Academy, an organization of professors advocating “viewpoint diversity,” was recently established to combat the overweening influence of social justice ideology in the academy. Meanwhile, a Sokal Hoax redux recently exposed social-justice-inflected fields for political tendentiousness and absurdity, as the lampooners made a mockery of acceptable research in what they pejoratively termed “grievance studies.” In this talk, I review critiques of social justice then point to several emergent paradigms gaining attention outside of the academy. Published in the New English Review. February 2019.
Some leftists demand that one recognize the vast difference between the “real left” and "the left of capital”— or “woke capitalism,” bourgeois leftism, or what have you. The left of capital is the visible leftism that permeates most of the social order today—including academia, the media, digital media, and even corporate America.
A few months ago, I was surprised and disappointed to learn that Marx’s famous statement, the title of this essay and a rejoinder to Hegel’s supposed remark—“that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice”—had been appropriated by the contemporary Slovenian Marxist and psychoanalytic theorist Slavoj Žižek, for the title of one of his books. I was disappointed because I had considered using the title myself. I was surprised because, not having read Žižek’s entire oeuvre, I hadn’t known of his appropriation. Further, quite apart from my own intended (and past casual) use, I was astonished to see how unselfconscious and lacking in intentional irony Žižek had been in naming a book about capitalism, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009).
One of the great ironies of Western political history involves the term “social justice.” Although a core idea within liberalism and socialism for at least 175 years, the background and origin of “social justice” was a cultural and political conservatism. The irony of the “cultural appropriation” of social justice by liberalism and socialism has recently redoubled.
At the moment postmodern theory lay dying in the academy, it bore a child, namely, “social justice.” Social justice gestated within the university as postmodern theory ruled the roost.
At the moment postmodern theory lay dying in the academy, it bore a child, namely, “social justice.” Social justice gestated within the university as postmodern theory ruled the roost. It was nursed during the Occupy movement and the Obama era. The financial crisis left its hapless followers in search of empowerment. It took root on the internet on social media. But because its parent had taught it that the object world is not real, or else that the world at large was beyond one’s purview, the child of postmodern theory could only change itself, as well as, so it imagined, those who bore signs of its oppressors. Published in Academic Questions. 31.2. (10 April 2018): 130-139. Print. Published online on April 10, 2018. Click here or on title.
