By now you may have heard of the term “self-partnering.” It’s a recent addition to the burgeoning lexicon of identity categories. Contrary to its vocal advocates, the coinage is a euphemism at best – for “lonely as hell.” (Originally published on RT.com. December 9, 2019.)
Because gender identity was introduced by John Money, I refer to our gender predicament as “the gender jackpot.” That is, by suggesting that the terms gender and gender roles differ from sex and sex roles, Money initiated the multiplication of identities that has bewitched us ever since. (Originally published on Campus Reform. December 5, 2019.)
Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page’s interview isn’t about clawing back the dignity Donald Trump’s insults have denied her – it’s damage control before a likely damning DOJ report about the agency’s Russian collusion investigation. (Originally published on RT.Com. December 3, 2019.)
As the Gulag Archipelago had once represented the most developed set of technological apparatuses for disciplinary and governmental power and control in the world, so the Google Archipelago represents the contemporary equivalent of these capacities, only considerably less corporeal in character to date, yet immeasurably magnified, diversified, and extended in scope. Click here or on title.
Recent attempts to address bias and stereotypes – including bias training in the workplace, bias reporting hotlines on campuses, and warnings about bias and racism in movies – are not only ineffective, they make matters worse. (Originally published on RT.com. November 23, 2019.)
Chick-Fil-A committed a grave error by ending donations to Christian groups dubbed “anti-LGBTQ” – not because the LGBTQ community “wins,” but because religious and other expression effectively loses. (Originally published on RT.com. November 21, 2019.)
Why have the biggest and most profitable American corporations embraced leftist politics, as seen in their woke advertising and social justice activism? Hint: It’s not because they’ve become non-profits and taken up philanthropy. (Originally published on RT.com. November 17, 2019.)
Dylan and I stumbled down the middle aisle as Bob Dylan took the stage. Standing about twenty-five yards from us, the skinny minstrel gripped the microphone, his penetrating eyes peering straight ahead, seeming to stare straight through me. Part of me was already beginning to write the story, while another part wondered whether I was worthy of this encounter. The first part immediately answered the second: “Only if what you write about it proves you worthy.”
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.
