Here are documents proving the FAA lowered the standards of certification for air traffic controllers and denied qualified people despite having a shortage:
This cannot be fairly described as, "My cousin’s friend works in the FAA and he told me they have annoyingly many anti-bias trainings."
This is only one story, about one agency. While I doubt it is the only such story, nor do I believe it is the modal example of DEI policy. I see no proof that this FAA policy directly caused the recent plane crash, though it's hard to imagine how it wouldn't have raised the likelihood of some bad outcome. I've certainly seen no proof that DEI caused the failure of the war in Afghanistan! Like you, I am disgusted by the POTUS throwing blame at DEI before corpses are cold. I agree with you that the cultural backlash we are currently experiencing is an insane overreaction.
This is important, I hadn't seen it, and I'll update my post to reflect it. Thank you for sharing. A few reflections as I process:
1. This is a real and infuriating scandal with evidence of a cover-up. It's also from 2013, and the extent to which it contributed to shortages 11+ years later seems very unclear. The Axios link I shared suggests a much more proximal cause of staffing shortages: "A 2023 inspector general report found that the pandemic prompted training pauses for nearly two years, significantly increasing air traffic controller certification times."
2. That it's from 2013 also means it cannot support the President and Vice Presidents' comments blaming the "DEI regime" of the Biden administration. If these policies have been in place since 2013, they were also the Trump administration's policies. And Axios reports that staffing did increase from pandemic levels under the Biden administration, per NATCA and FAA data.
3. The "my cousin's friend..." comment was a reference to this thread from Matt Walsh, which was what came up when I Googled "conservative evidence that DEI lowered standards at FAA" and clicked through the first five links or so. https://www.dailywire.com/news/plan-to-reduce-the-number-of-white-males-in-aviation-matt-walsh-reveals-troubling-internal-footage-of-faa-discussion-on-dei-agenda. On one hand, I take responsibility for not digging deep enough to find the actual evidence, and the fact I hadn't seen Tracy's report is a testament to the problem with polarized echo chambers. On the other, the actual evidence is harder to find when it's buried in an onslaught of anonymous sources leaking innocuous videos of Zoom calls, where conversations about how to increase diversity are cited as evidence of lowered standards.
4. Similarly, the maximum update this evidence suggests is to delete the most recent 1 of the 10 scandals I listed in which Republicans made unfounded suggestions. Which kind of proves my ultimate point about Boy Who Cried Wolf inhibiting nuanced conversations. It is difficult for left-leaning or even moderate-leaning people to extend an assumption of good faith to accusations that DEI is to blame for things, when those accusations are so frequently pulled from thin air. In 2014, I would have gobbled this story up. If I have a mind virus that prevents me from doing so now, exasperation with MAGA's habitual dishonesty is what infected me.
1. The fact that this happened in 2013 and was never addressed means that it has had 11 years to affect the hiring pipeline. In those circumstances, "It was a long time ago!" is not very satisfying. I accept that COVID is the likely proximate cause of recent acute staffing shortages, but that was surely worsened by preceding, chronic, wholly avoidable shortages.
2. I don't see how it's all that vindicating for progressives that these FAA policies began under Obama rather than Biden. I don't see the value, except in point-scoring, from labeling these "the Trump administration's policies."
3. and 4. I agree that conservatives' tendency to cry wolf on DEI policies has made it far more difficult for reasonable, credible objections to surface through the noise. This is a real problem on other issues as well. Bigoted screeching has made it difficult for moderates to raise measured, evidence-based concerns. MAGA's habitual dishonesty is one of the worst things about our current political moment.
Re 1, it was addressed in 2015 by an act of Congress. Trace's reporting also concludes that while this effected who got through the first screen, it didn't effect who eventually got to be a ATC. He suggests it may have increased the avg time it took candidates to get through the training and qualification process.
Thanks for the clarification, yes. The biographical questionnaire was removed in 2015. From what I remember from Trace's reporting, hiring did not recover from the effects.
It's more than a little ironic that the people you write off as "astonishingly, dumbfoundingly stupid" knew about the DEI issues at the FAA well before you did.
It sounds like in your case, the "mind virus" you're infected with is the Fox News Fallacy
No, they mostly didn't. Many of them assumed the DEI aspect was a female pilot flying the plane, and why her parents didn't want her identity going public.
Also, the people blaming the plane crash on the DEI are still being stupid. The "DEI issue" was resolved in 2015, and even that issue is not known to have affected who got to be an ATC. There are more recent and plausible explanations for a staffing shortage, and there has been no investigation of the cause yet, so we don't even know the FAA was to blame. Maybe the pilot was drunk, etc. You'd only instantly leap to that conclusion if you started out *really wanting* to blame every bad thing that happens on DEI.
Also also, I crossed out the FAA example in my post, and the remaining nine incidents are more than enough to qualify as "astonishingly, dumbfoundingly stupid."
The DEI issues in question are most certainly not resolved; the airline that landed upside down in Toronto is STILL bragging on their social media profile about their diversity uber alles hiring approach
The link you sent proves my point more than yours. By "DEI", you mean there are tweets from 2017 and 2022 celebrating two all-women flight crews for trailblazing. And a website that values an "inclusive environment." That's not bad! That's not evidence of lowered standards for pilots! And citing the existence of occasional female flight crews as evidence of lowered standards, with wink/nod videos of a woman crashing a Go Kart, is part of why see conservatives as stupid bigots. There is nothing wrong with diversity, nothing wrong with celebrating it, no evidence any of this has fuck all to do with a plane crash 3 years later, and nobody intelligent who trolls on Twitter suggesting it does.
Put it this way, if a basketball organization that constantly brags about how dedicated they are to hiring short white guys fields a pro basketball team that's......all short white guys, it's unlikely they got there via a colourblind merit-based recruiting process.
Quota-based hiring is, in fact, bad, and DEI is largely an exercise in quotas. Quotas are especially dangerous when it comes to avoiding plane crashes; this is now an issue that's going to get worse before it gets better:
Respectfully, I think you are underestimating the negative effects DEI has had on standards. For example, there were job searches for science professors in the UC system where upwards of three quarters of applicants had their applications tossed purely on the basis of diversity statements not being good enough:
I don't think I would have to explain to you why it would be bad to pre-emptively disqualify the tallest 75% of your job applicants, or the 75% least patriotic. Their goal is not to reduce standards, fine, but it is pretty inevitable that you will sometimes end up with weaker people at the job if you get disqualify a large fraction of the candidates for dumb reasons. What's more, if you make it impossible for conservatives to get hired even for non-ideological science jobs at the universities their tax dollars pay for, you can't act totally shocked when they start finding ways to defund and generally screw over universities.
Beyond the issue of hiring, there's the issue of admissions. The abolition of SATs at many universities and the reliance on subjective measures, The Great Mushification of admissions if you will, is clearly DEI driven and will result in reduced standards and more gaming of the system.
I hate Trump as much as the next Canadian, but this stuff is pretty bad and hopefully it isn't resurrected the next time Democrats take power
Another criticism of the equity stuff is that equity does not mean anything different than equality. In context, it usually just means "my view of equality is correct and should therefore be called equity and you are ignorant to disagree." This is obviously a frustrating thing to hear from a DEI consultant or authority figure since there is no counterarguement possible. That's probably why conservatives are so eager to just throw away entire institutions rather than make an argument against specific policies. (That is bad however)
Matt Bruenig, husband of Elizabeth, wrote about equity definitions here
edit: to be clear, I mean that that cartoon and (usually) the accompanying trainings are not making an argument for any particular worldview, except whichever one the speaker happens to hold. It's like saying "We should do my idea because it's the right thing to do."
Very well written. You did a good job of cutting through most misleading statements. However, I would suggest you (along with almost everyone else) misunderstand the Bud Light issue.
> putting a trans person in an ad
I believe that was not the primary issue. It's what people latched onto, but that was a post hoc rationalization.
The initial emotional reaction was due to the ad itself being insulting towards Bud Light and college basketball fans... Not because Mulvaney is trans, but because the obvious insincerity of what she said in the ad. "Whatever team you love, I love too." epitomizes it, but there were more lines like that.
If instead of a low effort, insincere post, they had shown Mulvaney traveling around and experiencing the fun of college basketball and in the end thanking Bud Light and college basketball fans for exposing her to something new to her and turning her into a fan which happens to coincide with her 1 year anniversary, then the reaction would have been totally different.
Sure, there would have been some negative responses, but the overall reaction would have been positive since it would be complimenting Bud Light & college basketball fans, instead of treating them like they are rubes.
Basically, the advertising team broke every rule for making a good ad and Bud Light (and the trans community) paid the price.
The thing is, DEI is practiced differently at different companies/institutions.
At my company, DEI is just window dressing to prevent lawsuits.
At my cousin's company, they were serious about DEI and their annual review, promotions, etc were tied to hiring more underrepresented employees. This caused a lot of new employees to be underqualified and just given busywork/paperwork (mind you, we're talking about software engineering roles). The ones that were halfway competent were promoted right away.
You totally hit the nail on the head. I was a conservative never-Trumper, and I remember during the George Floyd riots being simultaneously disgusted at people who would excuse the violence of rioters, and disgusted with people who argued that Floyd had it coming and were championing the guy who killed protestors. One side was enabling violence, the other was actively calling for it. If those are my choices, I'll go with the enablers. We do have a responsibility to police the far left just as Republicans today SHOULD be policing the far right. What we need today is a coalition of moderates on both sides fighting against extremism in their own parties, but it's pretty hard to pull that off in a winner-take-all election system with so many safe Congressional seats. Looking forward to part 2.
> most of us never bought everything the radicals were selling. The reasons we bit our tongue ...
I agree with all your main points and I distrust anyone with a definite opinion on the crash until the FAA or some other competent investigator has published a report.
But on the line I quoted, I guess there are far fewer people who bit their tounge because of the stupidity of the other side and many more who feared being permanently locked out of their left-leaning field or research area and losing most of their friend group. If you're a postdoc or an adjunct, being cancelled matters.
Very few people would have been canceled for writing what I wrote in the top section. Even in academia, which was far to the left of most professions. And even those friendships would not generally have been broken in 2012 or 2014, because nobody thought it was beyond the pale to associate with Mitt Romney or Rand Paul. I was in university as a vocal libertarian from 2011-2015 and had plenty of respectful conversations with progressives. It was Trump, in particular, and that made punching left seem to reveal such misplaced priorities. Jeffrey Maurer wrote a funny piece about this here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/to-fight-wokeness-vote-harris
What was going on in academia wasn't just DEI. It was a witch hunt perpetuated mostly by students and enabled by faculty. And the ones who made the best arguments for why it was bad were center-left liberals like Jonathan Haidt. I don't remember any of them complaining about DEI, except maybe to point to evidence that it doesn't work. You could fix almost everything wrong with academia without touching DEI, though I agree that we are likely better off without it. And if the Right successfully removes DEI from academia, that won't turn them into bastions of free speech and competing ideas. They are separate issues.
My read on what's gone wrong in academia starts with money, and develops into adjunctification where you hire junior academics on rolling fixed-term contracts, give them a massive teaching load but still expect them to do research on the side, and point out subtly that you could not rehire them next year, but I'm sure you'll keep your ass in line, right?
That creates a huge adjunct/faculty, adjunct/administration and adjunct/student power imbalance. That Hamline incident with the painting of the prophet Mohammed in an art history class? Technically the uni didn't FIRE him, they just chose not to renew his contract the next year and take him off teaching in the meantime. I imagine someone telling him "you're a ****ing adjunct, your job is to keep your head down and your students happy". I agree it's not just DEI - they'd probably not rehire someone if students complained enough they didn't like his shoes, or someone with a lot of social power didn't get the A grade they expected.
I think you're right again that removing DEI won't change a thing here.
Universities, like any other organization, have to have the right to hire people who align with their goals and values, and fire people who don't. The problem isn't that they can fire people, of course they should be able to do that. The problem is that the goal of higher education is the pursuit of knowledge, not to maintain ideological purity. University presidents today don't have more money or power than they did 50 years ago, they just lost sight of their purpose. You can't force them to get back to that, you can just try to persuade them and vote with your feet.
The biggest push for all this stuff didn't come from presidents or board members, it came from students. What happened in academia is that there used to be a time when professors could tell their students to shut up and go away. Instead, today they are treated like children and coddled. Their every whim is catered to. If money motivates any of this, it's the students money that the academics are scared to lose.
"But in my left-leaning circles, most of us never bought everything the radicals were selling. The reasons we bit our tongue, these past years, were more that we didn’t want to be associated with the weakest and ugliest arguments on the planet."
Speaking as someone who actually more-or-less agrees with a lot of what you've written here (although I think the DEI lot overreached by more than you seem to): the quote above is the reason I consider people like you to hold a large share of responsibility for the current mess.
In biting your tongues, you didn't defend against those arguments, you abandoned the field to them. You created a world where anyone who didn't buy into the whole DEI/woke thing had no sane allies to turn to - the only ones who would stand by them if they dared say anything were the opposing radicals.
And the biggest problem is that your group had (and to a significant extent still have) close to a monopoly on sophisticated arguments. You nod towards this yourself in the text when you mention that not everyone can put their finger on why the equity image-as-argument feels wrong, even if they know it does. Well, the people who can put their finger on why, the people with the talent, education and vocabulary to actually defend themselves while pushing back against the DEI-mongers - that is, the people like you - are heavily concentrated in those left-leaning circles you mentioned.
You could have given the masses who never took Philosophy 101 the words that they couldn't find on their own. Given them a template to follow, a way to argue against the overreach without going overboard in the other direction.
You didn't. You left them with no response to "if you don't agree with [insert talking-point here], you're literally a Nazi".
If you know anything about human nature, it should have been obvious where that was going to lead: "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable".
You invert both causality and culpability. MAGA did not radicalize because reasonable people stopped quibbling with the left. Reasonable people stopped quibbling with the left because MAGA radicalized, which made those quibbles small potatoes by comparison. And the reason MAGA radicalized was emphatically not from a dearth of intelligent, principled alternatives available to them. It was because they had not the faintest interest in the entire project of elevated discussion, which caused them to repeatedly reject those alternatives in favor of the base emotions they wanted to feel.
I’m very confident about this because used to passionately believe the opposite thing, until reality made a fool of me. I spent over a decade trying very hard to "give the [conservative] masses...the words that they couldn't find on their own," but it turned out they were never looking for "sane allies to turn to." They were looking for someone to validate the feelings of rage and resentment they already held, the more strident the better. The less nuanced, the better. The shorter the words, the better.
To observe that left-leaning people have “close to a monopoly on sophisticated arguments”—that "the people with the talent, education and vocabulary" all lean left—is to basically concede my point. I'll make a future post elaborating on this.
Wrong. Maga ‘radicalized’ because they were shut out of ordinary discourse. When an entire group is shut out of ordinary discourse it, obvious to everyone, becomes unordinary.
I agree with your frustration at some of the sloppy hyperbole on the right regarding wokeness, and it's certainly not accurate to say that the median Democratic voter bought it hook, line, and sinker. But I'm not sure how much the sentiment of ordinary voters particularly shaped policy as opposed to what was fashionable in the institutions and receiving oodles of grant money. A glib, rabid reflex of any problem being because greedy racists hadn't empowered the saintly experts enough was the defining ideology of prestigious technocratic institutions for many, many years, whether one dates that to the collapse of the USSR or rise of the Obama campaign. Regardless of the sparseness of true believing adherents on the ground, it was still influential and dangerous.
I agree with you about the glib, rabid reflex. It frustrated me too, going to grad school in that era. But I also think there's a difference between wokeness and DEI, in particular - and also that even wokeness was much more present in some policy institutions than others. Universities, yes. HHS? Probably. The US Army? No, not in the amounts Republicans pretended. Covid vaccines are not woke. Black History Month is not woke. And the withdrawal from Afghanistan was messy for reasons that had fuck. All. To do with race or DEI. As much as Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio might have wishcast that, it was separate entirely.
You also can't seem to help succumbing to the glib, rabid reflex of flattering your assumptions about well-informed libs always having the facts on their side while those low-information MAGA chuds are always "astonishingly, dumbfoundingly stupid".
In reality, those supposedly low-information chuds were right about a whole host of issues while the liberal intelligentsia were just deadass wrong.
- Joe Biden's cognitive decline (liberal experts all agreed he was "sharp as a tack")
- Campus activists having an antisemitic streak a mile wide (before Oct 7th liberal experts agreed there was no such thing as left wing antisemitism)
- Hunter Biden's laptop being genuine and not "Russian misinformation"
- Covid originating in a lab
- Covid vaccines not actually preventing infection or transmission, while having myocarditis as a fairly common side effect (in young males particularly)
- School closures leading to learning loss (liberal experts all agreed it wouldn't happen because "kids are resilient")
- Pandemic stimulus policies causing inflation that was far more than just "transitory"
- The southern border being "totally secure" under Biden's administration
And so on and so on, the low-information MAGA chuds are consistently better at getting the facts right than highly credentialed liberal experts.
I never said liberals always have facts on their side. My whole newsletter is founded on exasperation with the pressures of tribal groupthink that affect the left too. But it is not a symmetrical problem, and liberal elites do have the facts on their side more frequently than conservatives. The bottom of this Dan Williams piece helps keep the tribes' errors in perspective: https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/americas-epistemological-crisis
The examples you've chosen are cherry-picked, and I could list three in the other direction for each one. But even among those, you're only right on maybe half. And even then, you conflate long-term predictions (always a difficult guess) with denial of observable reality (like the election not being stolen).
1. Joe Biden's decline - half true. No, liberal experts did not all agree he was "sharp as a tack." Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart both criticized him as too old in February, months before the debate, and there was a fierce debate over whether he should run again because of his age. You are right that election-year partisan groupthink caused many to downplay his slippage for too long, until they had clear evidence. But as soon as they were presented with clear evidence, during the debate, they updated their opinions and demanded his ouster. That's because updating one's beliefs in light of new information, instead of plugging one's ears or changing the subject, is something liberals are much more fair-minded about than the anti-intellectual right.
2 - Campus antisemitism - not true, you just mischaracterize what liberal elites have ever believed. Very few would have said "there is no such thing as left-wing antisemitism." The exact definition of antisemitism remains very controversial in both parties, as does the extent of it in the post-10/7 protests, and the scale of that problem compared to the policies those students were protesting. But even back in 2019, 7 Democratic senators cosponsored legislation to raise awareness of antisemitism on college campuses and codify the (very debatable) IHRA definition of antisemitism. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/852
3 - Hunter Biden's laptop - this was true...for like, two days. That's how long the story was wrongly demoted on Twitter. Facebook was a few weeks iirc, before the liberal elites once again updated in light of new information. And again, part of the reason they were so briefly trigger-happy on this potentially being disinformation is because of the *onslaught of actual disinformation* that conservatives really were spreading about COVID and other things that election year, including the eventual outcome of that election. Have all these very astute MAGA folks come out and admitted they were wrong about that one, in the way that prominent left-leaning outlets introspected and accepted fault for the Hunter story?
4 - Covid origins - half point, generously. Covid's origins remain hotly debated. Both the wet market and lab leak theories are plausible, but the evidence still tilts slightly in favor of the wet market theory. The best rundown of the evidence I've seen is from this Rootclaim debate for $100,000, in which both of the judges agreed the wet market theory was more plausible. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim Of the six US Government agencies that have weighed in on the subject, four believe the wet market theory and two believe the lab leak theory. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66005240 You are right to criticize the left for initially dismissing this theory as fake news just because Trump said it. But you are wrong to list it as a case where conservatives were right and liberals were wrong, since liberals are at least as likely to be right.
5 - COVID vaccines - bullshit. COVID vaccines work and are broadly safe. The evidence is abundantly clear that they save lives and reduce the risk, severity, and duration of sickness and transmissibility. The conservatives who spent years spreading fake news about them were full of it. It takes an incredible amount of mental gymnastics to invert this to a case where liberals were wrong and conservatives were right because Biden or the CDC occasionally used imprecise language in explaining their exact benefits. My feed had Trumpers saying they were a ploy for Bill Gates to implant us with microchips - you are grading on different scales.
Your last three are not questions of empirical fact, just different priorities or predictions for future outcomes. I agree the school closures were bad policy that lasted too long in some places. I agree the stimulus was one of the many things that caused inflation to spike and the MMT fools were wrong to dismiss that possibility. But all of this is easier said with hindsight than in real-time before the studies were in. Predicting future health, education, and economic outcomes is difficult, and Republicans certainly have a long track record of bad predictions too. It's a different category of knowledge than facts about the world right now.
Finally, the security of the southern border thing is again begging the question about whether immigrants posed a serious security risk, which is partly a question of subjective risk tolerance, not empirical right and wrong. We could just as easily say "Conservatives yelled nonstop about border security for four years, and yet there still hasn't been a major terror attack from it, and the historical rate of terrorism committed by illegal immigrants is very tiny, so clearly their fears were overblown." https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/terrorism-immigration-risk-analysis-1975-2023
That Dan Williams piece ends up assuming what it's trying to prove - it says conservatives prefer common sense while progressives prefer credentialed left-wing activists, and then ends by just baldly asserting that of course the credentialed left-wing activists are better than common sense because "ignorance, error, and tribal narratives are the default state" for common sense, even though the exact same issues are true of the credentialed left-wing activists.
- On Biden's decline; conservatives were pointing it out as far back as 2020; it took YEARS for liberals to stop circling the wagons and accept reality.
- "Very few would have said 'there is no such thing as left-wing antisemitism'" is only true if you count every establishment media outlet, every Dean and Provost on every college campus, and the entirety of Bluesky as the "very few"
- It took until well after the election for every establishment media outlet like the NYT to admit the NYPost reporting was accurate
- the benefits of Covid vaccines are HEAVILY skewed towards the old, infirm, and those with severe comorbidities. For young healthy adults, Covid was (and remains) a glorified case of the sniffles, so mandating a myocarditis jab to healthy young people so as to prevent a case of the sniffles is the epitome of the cure being worse than the disease. You're still living in the woke delusion bubble on that one.
As for "all of this is easier said with hindsight" - the problem is conservatives predicted ALL of those adverse outcomes (inflation, learning loss, etc.), and liberals ignored those warnings because "experts know best". Clearly not; all those problems were not only foreseeable, but FORESEEN by conservatives well before they came to pass.
Regarding the border, to only look at terrorism specifically ignores all of the other forms social and economic fallout of years of open border policies. Conservatives could apply similar tunnel vision and say "since Trump retook office in January there hasn't been a single terrorist attack, therefore everything Trump has done has been perfect and wonderful and there have been no downsides whatsoever to any of his decisions or policies"
As I summarized in my article:
"The liberal tendency to be the the last ones to find out about anything that could conceivably make their team look bad has proven to be a potent advantage (not to mention lucrative business opportunity) for conservatives, particularly of the populist variety. On issues ranging from immigration, to housing, to inflation, to crime, to addiction enablement, to all things transgender, conservatives have a tremendous first-mover advantage. They can be first to pitch voters on their solutions to problems because unlike liberals, they’re not wasting years denying those problems exist while smearing anyone attempting to address those problems as a deplorable bigot and/or Threat to Democracy Itself.
The political ascendance of populism can be largely attributed to widespread frustration with years of governance guided by the virtue-signaling political priorities of ivory-tower liberals, who are not only personally insulated from the consequences of their policies, but who subsist on a media diet that systematically curates into oblivion all feedback on how those feelgood policies are actually working out."
The conservatives alleging Biden's decline in 2020 were wrong. He had not declined by then. It didn't take liberals years to catch up to reality, it took reality years to catch up with what conservatives had wishcast while Biden was still giving fiery speeches and outperforming Trump in debates.
You don't get to cite a NYT *opinion* guest essay as evidence that the NYT disagrees with me. Unlike MAGA media, the NYT sometimes publishes opeds it does not agree with. I provided much more detailed evidence summarizing 15 hours of expert debate on this issue.
You are simply mistaken about the vaccines. Believe it or not, old people's lives count too, and herd immunity (read: young people getting vaccinated) is part of what was needed to save them. There were microscopic (under 2 per 10,000 cases) increases in the risk of myocarditis in men under 30, but those increases were *lower* than the increased risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 infection itself, which you called "just the sniffles." And most of those myocarditis cases were also very mild. Even adopting a purely selfish rubric, the risk/reward assessment from those vaccines for young people is clearly positive, and the narrative to the contrary is discredited anti-science hokum.
It's a bit rich to accuse me of being in a bubble when half of your links are to a far-right spin factory called NotTheBee. You are an ideologue blinded by bias in the best case, with a head buried deep in the laziest, sloppiest right-wing media diet. I wish you luck in escaping it.
Biden's administration had to hide his cognitive decline literally from day 1 of his presidency, so by January 2021 he was already a vegetable (and didn't get there overnight)
So yes, it did take liberals years to catch up to reality (as it so often does).
Herd immunity is a completely irrelevant factor when the vaccines *don't* prevent infection and *don't* prevent transmission. So no, old people didn't benefit in any way from forcing young people to take the jab.
Similarly, the fact that the vaccines don't prevent infection or transmission means young people did not benefit from getting injected with a vaccine that causes myocarditis at a significantly higher rate than Covid causes hospitalization among young people.
If I get Covid twice, that's 2 myocarditis windows. If I get vaccinated twice and still get Covid twice (because again, the jab doesn't prevent infection), that is now 4 myocarditis windows. For those keeping score, 4 is higher than 2.
I have therefore doubled my myocarditis risk without lowering my infection risk, and the hospitalization risk from Covid for healthy young adults is well below the vaccine myocarditis rate, so symptom reduction is a negligible "benefit".
So no, the risk/reward does not check out for getting jabbed with the myocarditis juice to prevent sniffles symptoms. I wish I'd been much more of an antivaxxer at the time; I'm now on a waitlist for my 3rd heart surgery in as many years and I'm not even 35 years old yet. Sadly, I made the colossal fuckup of 'trusting the experts'.
If you think notthebee is "far-right", then I'd infer from that you think everyone to the right of AOC is a literal Nazi. Plus, I read both left wing and right wing sources (hence I can also cite New York Times), while you seem to get your news exclusively from NPR and MSNBC. Have fun in your woke bubble I guess, and best of luck with that whole Defund the Police thing. I'm sure it will turn out great.
“The people supporting DEI from 2018-2023 or so were typically well-meaning champions of social justice who got a bit carried away while trying to solve real problems.”
Oh, a bit carried away? This deluded shit is going to get Trump a third term.
I’ll tell you right now I won’t vote for anyone with this opinion for the simple reason that people who can’t admit they made a huge mistake are almost certainly going to make a similar mistake again.
You guys fucked up and disgraced yourself, just admit it and move on.
As huge mistakes that disgrace oneself go, how does DEI compare against attempting a coup to subvert a democratic election, in terms of opinions you won't vote for?
And which similar mistake, if repeated, seems likelier to "get Trump a third term" ?
I didn't fuck up at all, thank you. I didn't get carried away. I just distinguished internet vibes from government policy, and kept those priorities in perspective.
I've read a few of these "how DEI overreached" kinds of essays on Substack recently, and for my $0.02, it's less a question of reach as it is a question of nature/tone. "Over/Under reaching" has a teleological undercurrent that I don't think jibes with my thoughts on how this whole thing came undone. For me, it's more a matter of a once-optimistic and hopeful movement metastasizing into a directionless, nihilistic attitude that is both self-reinforcing and self-undermining at the same time.
Self-reinforcing in the way that it de facto treats all criticism or hesitance as a product of and reinforcement of an oppressive status-quo. If you've got reservations about some aspect, then it can only be because of your privilege, white fragility, heterosexism, learned racial biases, or a combination thereof. Even in the event that a person who is themselves marginalized has a contradictory opinion, this is explained away via false consciousness, self-hatred, effect of colonization, etc. It is invalidating and agency-denying while at the same time espousing liberation.
Self-undermining because it is easily gamed, once you know the rhetorical gambit, for ends which directly contradict it. The resistance to and denial of objective truth claims, scientific and logical epistemologies, etc, and general descent into postmodern nihilistic jargon makes it pretty easy for people like Steve Bannon to cynically co-opt the rhetorical framework to say basically, "you're right, it's all about power, and you all have that now in the domain of culture, so are now the oppressive status-quo". This is exactly how the rebel left became the progressive version of Maude Flanders, and the Alex Keatons of the world became the new radicals and rebels. Social Justice liberalism embraced the worst parts of Critical Theory (the endlessly pedantic circular critique, and solipsistic denial of any base for shared truth) because it was rhetorically convenient in order to undermine the previous order, but in doing so they also painted themselves into a corner with no productive endgame. Just endless performative self-flagellation.
Couple this with the classically toxic social media zeitgeist of flamewars, cancel campaigns, call-out culture, and general enshittification, and it all just took on a really sour aura. It also did all of this while...not actually accomplishing much of anything material. The culture has genuinely changed such that younger people I think are generally more open to cultures beyond their own, but it's hard to know how permanent that change will be as Gen Z/Alpha matures and grows into whatever sociopolitical zeitgeist they will become.
I think the last point is what makes me really "meh" about the question of whether "wokeness" was an "overreach". For it to be that it would have had to have materially changed something in a very profound way, not just in vibes. Vibes change all the time.
The reason DEI is so disliked is the small, day to day ways in which in intrudes on people’s daily life in their work world. Maybe I will bring myself to write or comment about it.
It’s what the cool kids in progressive circles would call microagression 😉🤷🏽♂️
Here are documents proving the FAA lowered the standards of certification for air traffic controllers and denied qualified people despite having a shortage:
https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring
This cannot be fairly described as, "My cousin’s friend works in the FAA and he told me they have annoyingly many anti-bias trainings."
This is only one story, about one agency. While I doubt it is the only such story, nor do I believe it is the modal example of DEI policy. I see no proof that this FAA policy directly caused the recent plane crash, though it's hard to imagine how it wouldn't have raised the likelihood of some bad outcome. I've certainly seen no proof that DEI caused the failure of the war in Afghanistan! Like you, I am disgusted by the POTUS throwing blame at DEI before corpses are cold. I agree with you that the cultural backlash we are currently experiencing is an insane overreaction.
This is important, I hadn't seen it, and I'll update my post to reflect it. Thank you for sharing. A few reflections as I process:
1. This is a real and infuriating scandal with evidence of a cover-up. It's also from 2013, and the extent to which it contributed to shortages 11+ years later seems very unclear. The Axios link I shared suggests a much more proximal cause of staffing shortages: "A 2023 inspector general report found that the pandemic prompted training pauses for nearly two years, significantly increasing air traffic controller certification times."
2. That it's from 2013 also means it cannot support the President and Vice Presidents' comments blaming the "DEI regime" of the Biden administration. If these policies have been in place since 2013, they were also the Trump administration's policies. And Axios reports that staffing did increase from pandemic levels under the Biden administration, per NATCA and FAA data.
3. The "my cousin's friend..." comment was a reference to this thread from Matt Walsh, which was what came up when I Googled "conservative evidence that DEI lowered standards at FAA" and clicked through the first five links or so. https://www.dailywire.com/news/plan-to-reduce-the-number-of-white-males-in-aviation-matt-walsh-reveals-troubling-internal-footage-of-faa-discussion-on-dei-agenda. On one hand, I take responsibility for not digging deep enough to find the actual evidence, and the fact I hadn't seen Tracy's report is a testament to the problem with polarized echo chambers. On the other, the actual evidence is harder to find when it's buried in an onslaught of anonymous sources leaking innocuous videos of Zoom calls, where conversations about how to increase diversity are cited as evidence of lowered standards.
4. Similarly, the maximum update this evidence suggests is to delete the most recent 1 of the 10 scandals I listed in which Republicans made unfounded suggestions. Which kind of proves my ultimate point about Boy Who Cried Wolf inhibiting nuanced conversations. It is difficult for left-leaning or even moderate-leaning people to extend an assumption of good faith to accusations that DEI is to blame for things, when those accusations are so frequently pulled from thin air. In 2014, I would have gobbled this story up. If I have a mind virus that prevents me from doing so now, exasperation with MAGA's habitual dishonesty is what infected me.
1. The fact that this happened in 2013 and was never addressed means that it has had 11 years to affect the hiring pipeline. In those circumstances, "It was a long time ago!" is not very satisfying. I accept that COVID is the likely proximate cause of recent acute staffing shortages, but that was surely worsened by preceding, chronic, wholly avoidable shortages.
2. I don't see how it's all that vindicating for progressives that these FAA policies began under Obama rather than Biden. I don't see the value, except in point-scoring, from labeling these "the Trump administration's policies."
3. and 4. I agree that conservatives' tendency to cry wolf on DEI policies has made it far more difficult for reasonable, credible objections to surface through the noise. This is a real problem on other issues as well. Bigoted screeching has made it difficult for moderates to raise measured, evidence-based concerns. MAGA's habitual dishonesty is one of the worst things about our current political moment.
Re 1, it was addressed in 2015 by an act of Congress. Trace's reporting also concludes that while this effected who got through the first screen, it didn't effect who eventually got to be a ATC. He suggests it may have increased the avg time it took candidates to get through the training and qualification process.
Thanks for the clarification, yes. The biographical questionnaire was removed in 2015. From what I remember from Trace's reporting, hiring did not recover from the effects.
It's more than a little ironic that the people you write off as "astonishingly, dumbfoundingly stupid" knew about the DEI issues at the FAA well before you did.
It sounds like in your case, the "mind virus" you're infected with is the Fox News Fallacy
https://www.liberalpatriot.com/p/the-fox-news-fallacy
No, they mostly didn't. Many of them assumed the DEI aspect was a female pilot flying the plane, and why her parents didn't want her identity going public.
Also, the people blaming the plane crash on the DEI are still being stupid. The "DEI issue" was resolved in 2015, and even that issue is not known to have affected who got to be an ATC. There are more recent and plausible explanations for a staffing shortage, and there has been no investigation of the cause yet, so we don't even know the FAA was to blame. Maybe the pilot was drunk, etc. You'd only instantly leap to that conclusion if you started out *really wanting* to blame every bad thing that happens on DEI.
Also also, I crossed out the FAA example in my post, and the remaining nine incidents are more than enough to qualify as "astonishingly, dumbfoundingly stupid."
The DEI issues in question are most certainly not resolved; the airline that landed upside down in Toronto is STILL bragging on their social media profile about their diversity uber alles hiring approach
https://notthebee.com/article/plane-that-crashed-at-toronto-airport-was-operated-by-endeavor-air-an-airline-obsessed-with-all-female-flight-crews
The link you sent proves my point more than yours. By "DEI", you mean there are tweets from 2017 and 2022 celebrating two all-women flight crews for trailblazing. And a website that values an "inclusive environment." That's not bad! That's not evidence of lowered standards for pilots! And citing the existence of occasional female flight crews as evidence of lowered standards, with wink/nod videos of a woman crashing a Go Kart, is part of why see conservatives as stupid bigots. There is nothing wrong with diversity, nothing wrong with celebrating it, no evidence any of this has fuck all to do with a plane crash 3 years later, and nobody intelligent who trolls on Twitter suggesting it does.
Put it this way, if a basketball organization that constantly brags about how dedicated they are to hiring short white guys fields a pro basketball team that's......all short white guys, it's unlikely they got there via a colourblind merit-based recruiting process.
Quota-based hiring is, in fact, bad, and DEI is largely an exercise in quotas. Quotas are especially dangerous when it comes to avoiding plane crashes; this is now an issue that's going to get worse before it gets better:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/06/01/complex-systems-wont-survive-the-competence-crisis/
DEI is fundamentally anti-merit, anti-excellence, and a recipe for witch-hunts.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/higher-ed-must-choose-merit-over-identity
https://www.westernstandard.news/news/half-of-ucla-med-students-fail-basic-tests-since-lowering-standards-for-minorities/54812
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/richard-bilkszto-cherished-merit-and-equality-canada-should-too
Respectfully, I think you are underestimating the negative effects DEI has had on standards. For example, there were job searches for science professors in the UC system where upwards of three quarters of applicants had their applications tossed purely on the basis of diversity statements not being good enough:
https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diversity-initiative-berkeley/
I don't think I would have to explain to you why it would be bad to pre-emptively disqualify the tallest 75% of your job applicants, or the 75% least patriotic. Their goal is not to reduce standards, fine, but it is pretty inevitable that you will sometimes end up with weaker people at the job if you get disqualify a large fraction of the candidates for dumb reasons. What's more, if you make it impossible for conservatives to get hired even for non-ideological science jobs at the universities their tax dollars pay for, you can't act totally shocked when they start finding ways to defund and generally screw over universities.
Beyond the issue of hiring, there's the issue of admissions. The abolition of SATs at many universities and the reliance on subjective measures, The Great Mushification of admissions if you will, is clearly DEI driven and will result in reduced standards and more gaming of the system.
I hate Trump as much as the next Canadian, but this stuff is pretty bad and hopefully it isn't resurrected the next time Democrats take power
Another criticism of the equity stuff is that equity does not mean anything different than equality. In context, it usually just means "my view of equality is correct and should therefore be called equity and you are ignorant to disagree." This is obviously a frustrating thing to hear from a DEI consultant or authority figure since there is no counterarguement possible. That's probably why conservatives are so eager to just throw away entire institutions rather than make an argument against specific policies. (That is bad however)
Matt Bruenig, husband of Elizabeth, wrote about equity definitions here
https://mattbruenig.com/2023/03/05/equality-and-equity/
edit: to be clear, I mean that that cartoon and (usually) the accompanying trainings are not making an argument for any particular worldview, except whichever one the speaker happens to hold. It's like saying "We should do my idea because it's the right thing to do."
Very well written. You did a good job of cutting through most misleading statements. However, I would suggest you (along with almost everyone else) misunderstand the Bud Light issue.
> putting a trans person in an ad
I believe that was not the primary issue. It's what people latched onto, but that was a post hoc rationalization.
The initial emotional reaction was due to the ad itself being insulting towards Bud Light and college basketball fans... Not because Mulvaney is trans, but because the obvious insincerity of what she said in the ad. "Whatever team you love, I love too." epitomizes it, but there were more lines like that.
If instead of a low effort, insincere post, they had shown Mulvaney traveling around and experiencing the fun of college basketball and in the end thanking Bud Light and college basketball fans for exposing her to something new to her and turning her into a fan which happens to coincide with her 1 year anniversary, then the reaction would have been totally different.
Sure, there would have been some negative responses, but the overall reaction would have been positive since it would be complimenting Bud Light & college basketball fans, instead of treating them like they are rubes.
Basically, the advertising team broke every rule for making a good ad and Bud Light (and the trans community) paid the price.
The thing is, DEI is practiced differently at different companies/institutions.
At my company, DEI is just window dressing to prevent lawsuits.
At my cousin's company, they were serious about DEI and their annual review, promotions, etc were tied to hiring more underrepresented employees. This caused a lot of new employees to be underqualified and just given busywork/paperwork (mind you, we're talking about software engineering roles). The ones that were halfway competent were promoted right away.
You totally hit the nail on the head. I was a conservative never-Trumper, and I remember during the George Floyd riots being simultaneously disgusted at people who would excuse the violence of rioters, and disgusted with people who argued that Floyd had it coming and were championing the guy who killed protestors. One side was enabling violence, the other was actively calling for it. If those are my choices, I'll go with the enablers. We do have a responsibility to police the far left just as Republicans today SHOULD be policing the far right. What we need today is a coalition of moderates on both sides fighting against extremism in their own parties, but it's pretty hard to pull that off in a winner-take-all election system with so many safe Congressional seats. Looking forward to part 2.
> most of us never bought everything the radicals were selling. The reasons we bit our tongue ...
I agree with all your main points and I distrust anyone with a definite opinion on the crash until the FAA or some other competent investigator has published a report.
But on the line I quoted, I guess there are far fewer people who bit their tounge because of the stupidity of the other side and many more who feared being permanently locked out of their left-leaning field or research area and losing most of their friend group. If you're a postdoc or an adjunct, being cancelled matters.
Very few people would have been canceled for writing what I wrote in the top section. Even in academia, which was far to the left of most professions. And even those friendships would not generally have been broken in 2012 or 2014, because nobody thought it was beyond the pale to associate with Mitt Romney or Rand Paul. I was in university as a vocal libertarian from 2011-2015 and had plenty of respectful conversations with progressives. It was Trump, in particular, and that made punching left seem to reveal such misplaced priorities. Jeffrey Maurer wrote a funny piece about this here: https://www.slowboring.com/p/to-fight-wokeness-vote-harris
What was going on in academia wasn't just DEI. It was a witch hunt perpetuated mostly by students and enabled by faculty. And the ones who made the best arguments for why it was bad were center-left liberals like Jonathan Haidt. I don't remember any of them complaining about DEI, except maybe to point to evidence that it doesn't work. You could fix almost everything wrong with academia without touching DEI, though I agree that we are likely better off without it. And if the Right successfully removes DEI from academia, that won't turn them into bastions of free speech and competing ideas. They are separate issues.
My read on what's gone wrong in academia starts with money, and develops into adjunctification where you hire junior academics on rolling fixed-term contracts, give them a massive teaching load but still expect them to do research on the side, and point out subtly that you could not rehire them next year, but I'm sure you'll keep your ass in line, right?
That creates a huge adjunct/faculty, adjunct/administration and adjunct/student power imbalance. That Hamline incident with the painting of the prophet Mohammed in an art history class? Technically the uni didn't FIRE him, they just chose not to renew his contract the next year and take him off teaching in the meantime. I imagine someone telling him "you're a ****ing adjunct, your job is to keep your head down and your students happy". I agree it's not just DEI - they'd probably not rehire someone if students complained enough they didn't like his shoes, or someone with a lot of social power didn't get the A grade they expected.
I think you're right again that removing DEI won't change a thing here.
Universities, like any other organization, have to have the right to hire people who align with their goals and values, and fire people who don't. The problem isn't that they can fire people, of course they should be able to do that. The problem is that the goal of higher education is the pursuit of knowledge, not to maintain ideological purity. University presidents today don't have more money or power than they did 50 years ago, they just lost sight of their purpose. You can't force them to get back to that, you can just try to persuade them and vote with your feet.
The biggest push for all this stuff didn't come from presidents or board members, it came from students. What happened in academia is that there used to be a time when professors could tell their students to shut up and go away. Instead, today they are treated like children and coddled. Their every whim is catered to. If money motivates any of this, it's the students money that the academics are scared to lose.
"But in my left-leaning circles, most of us never bought everything the radicals were selling. The reasons we bit our tongue, these past years, were more that we didn’t want to be associated with the weakest and ugliest arguments on the planet."
Speaking as someone who actually more-or-less agrees with a lot of what you've written here (although I think the DEI lot overreached by more than you seem to): the quote above is the reason I consider people like you to hold a large share of responsibility for the current mess.
In biting your tongues, you didn't defend against those arguments, you abandoned the field to them. You created a world where anyone who didn't buy into the whole DEI/woke thing had no sane allies to turn to - the only ones who would stand by them if they dared say anything were the opposing radicals.
And the biggest problem is that your group had (and to a significant extent still have) close to a monopoly on sophisticated arguments. You nod towards this yourself in the text when you mention that not everyone can put their finger on why the equity image-as-argument feels wrong, even if they know it does. Well, the people who can put their finger on why, the people with the talent, education and vocabulary to actually defend themselves while pushing back against the DEI-mongers - that is, the people like you - are heavily concentrated in those left-leaning circles you mentioned.
You could have given the masses who never took Philosophy 101 the words that they couldn't find on their own. Given them a template to follow, a way to argue against the overreach without going overboard in the other direction.
You didn't. You left them with no response to "if you don't agree with [insert talking-point here], you're literally a Nazi".
If you know anything about human nature, it should have been obvious where that was going to lead: "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable".
You invert both causality and culpability. MAGA did not radicalize because reasonable people stopped quibbling with the left. Reasonable people stopped quibbling with the left because MAGA radicalized, which made those quibbles small potatoes by comparison. And the reason MAGA radicalized was emphatically not from a dearth of intelligent, principled alternatives available to them. It was because they had not the faintest interest in the entire project of elevated discussion, which caused them to repeatedly reject those alternatives in favor of the base emotions they wanted to feel.
I’m very confident about this because used to passionately believe the opposite thing, until reality made a fool of me. I spent over a decade trying very hard to "give the [conservative] masses...the words that they couldn't find on their own," but it turned out they were never looking for "sane allies to turn to." They were looking for someone to validate the feelings of rage and resentment they already held, the more strident the better. The less nuanced, the better. The shorter the words, the better.
To observe that left-leaning people have “close to a monopoly on sophisticated arguments”—that "the people with the talent, education and vocabulary" all lean left—is to basically concede my point. I'll make a future post elaborating on this.
Wrong. Maga ‘radicalized’ because they were shut out of ordinary discourse. When an entire group is shut out of ordinary discourse it, obvious to everyone, becomes unordinary.
I agree with your frustration at some of the sloppy hyperbole on the right regarding wokeness, and it's certainly not accurate to say that the median Democratic voter bought it hook, line, and sinker. But I'm not sure how much the sentiment of ordinary voters particularly shaped policy as opposed to what was fashionable in the institutions and receiving oodles of grant money. A glib, rabid reflex of any problem being because greedy racists hadn't empowered the saintly experts enough was the defining ideology of prestigious technocratic institutions for many, many years, whether one dates that to the collapse of the USSR or rise of the Obama campaign. Regardless of the sparseness of true believing adherents on the ground, it was still influential and dangerous.
I agree with you about the glib, rabid reflex. It frustrated me too, going to grad school in that era. But I also think there's a difference between wokeness and DEI, in particular - and also that even wokeness was much more present in some policy institutions than others. Universities, yes. HHS? Probably. The US Army? No, not in the amounts Republicans pretended. Covid vaccines are not woke. Black History Month is not woke. And the withdrawal from Afghanistan was messy for reasons that had fuck. All. To do with race or DEI. As much as Josh Hawley or Marco Rubio might have wishcast that, it was separate entirely.
You also can't seem to help succumbing to the glib, rabid reflex of flattering your assumptions about well-informed libs always having the facts on their side while those low-information MAGA chuds are always "astonishingly, dumbfoundingly stupid".
In reality, those supposedly low-information chuds were right about a whole host of issues while the liberal intelligentsia were just deadass wrong.
A couple examples I wrote about include:
https://milesmcstylez.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-informed-liberal
- Joe Biden's cognitive decline (liberal experts all agreed he was "sharp as a tack")
- Campus activists having an antisemitic streak a mile wide (before Oct 7th liberal experts agreed there was no such thing as left wing antisemitism)
- Hunter Biden's laptop being genuine and not "Russian misinformation"
- Covid originating in a lab
- Covid vaccines not actually preventing infection or transmission, while having myocarditis as a fairly common side effect (in young males particularly)
- School closures leading to learning loss (liberal experts all agreed it wouldn't happen because "kids are resilient")
- Pandemic stimulus policies causing inflation that was far more than just "transitory"
- The southern border being "totally secure" under Biden's administration
And so on and so on, the low-information MAGA chuds are consistently better at getting the facts right than highly credentialed liberal experts.
I never said liberals always have facts on their side. My whole newsletter is founded on exasperation with the pressures of tribal groupthink that affect the left too. But it is not a symmetrical problem, and liberal elites do have the facts on their side more frequently than conservatives. The bottom of this Dan Williams piece helps keep the tribes' errors in perspective: https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/americas-epistemological-crisis
The examples you've chosen are cherry-picked, and I could list three in the other direction for each one. But even among those, you're only right on maybe half. And even then, you conflate long-term predictions (always a difficult guess) with denial of observable reality (like the election not being stolen).
1. Joe Biden's decline - half true. No, liberal experts did not all agree he was "sharp as a tack." Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart both criticized him as too old in February, months before the debate, and there was a fierce debate over whether he should run again because of his age. You are right that election-year partisan groupthink caused many to downplay his slippage for too long, until they had clear evidence. But as soon as they were presented with clear evidence, during the debate, they updated their opinions and demanded his ouster. That's because updating one's beliefs in light of new information, instead of plugging one's ears or changing the subject, is something liberals are much more fair-minded about than the anti-intellectual right.
2 - Campus antisemitism - not true, you just mischaracterize what liberal elites have ever believed. Very few would have said "there is no such thing as left-wing antisemitism." The exact definition of antisemitism remains very controversial in both parties, as does the extent of it in the post-10/7 protests, and the scale of that problem compared to the policies those students were protesting. But even back in 2019, 7 Democratic senators cosponsored legislation to raise awareness of antisemitism on college campuses and codify the (very debatable) IHRA definition of antisemitism. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/852
3 - Hunter Biden's laptop - this was true...for like, two days. That's how long the story was wrongly demoted on Twitter. Facebook was a few weeks iirc, before the liberal elites once again updated in light of new information. And again, part of the reason they were so briefly trigger-happy on this potentially being disinformation is because of the *onslaught of actual disinformation* that conservatives really were spreading about COVID and other things that election year, including the eventual outcome of that election. Have all these very astute MAGA folks come out and admitted they were wrong about that one, in the way that prominent left-leaning outlets introspected and accepted fault for the Hunter story?
4 - Covid origins - half point, generously. Covid's origins remain hotly debated. Both the wet market and lab leak theories are plausible, but the evidence still tilts slightly in favor of the wet market theory. The best rundown of the evidence I've seen is from this Rootclaim debate for $100,000, in which both of the judges agreed the wet market theory was more plausible. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim Of the six US Government agencies that have weighed in on the subject, four believe the wet market theory and two believe the lab leak theory. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66005240 You are right to criticize the left for initially dismissing this theory as fake news just because Trump said it. But you are wrong to list it as a case where conservatives were right and liberals were wrong, since liberals are at least as likely to be right.
5 - COVID vaccines - bullshit. COVID vaccines work and are broadly safe. The evidence is abundantly clear that they save lives and reduce the risk, severity, and duration of sickness and transmissibility. The conservatives who spent years spreading fake news about them were full of it. It takes an incredible amount of mental gymnastics to invert this to a case where liberals were wrong and conservatives were right because Biden or the CDC occasionally used imprecise language in explaining their exact benefits. My feed had Trumpers saying they were a ploy for Bill Gates to implant us with microchips - you are grading on different scales.
Your last three are not questions of empirical fact, just different priorities or predictions for future outcomes. I agree the school closures were bad policy that lasted too long in some places. I agree the stimulus was one of the many things that caused inflation to spike and the MMT fools were wrong to dismiss that possibility. But all of this is easier said with hindsight than in real-time before the studies were in. Predicting future health, education, and economic outcomes is difficult, and Republicans certainly have a long track record of bad predictions too. It's a different category of knowledge than facts about the world right now.
Finally, the security of the southern border thing is again begging the question about whether immigrants posed a serious security risk, which is partly a question of subjective risk tolerance, not empirical right and wrong. We could just as easily say "Conservatives yelled nonstop about border security for four years, and yet there still hasn't been a major terror attack from it, and the historical rate of terrorism committed by illegal immigrants is very tiny, so clearly their fears were overblown." https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/terrorism-immigration-risk-analysis-1975-2023
That Dan Williams piece ends up assuming what it's trying to prove - it says conservatives prefer common sense while progressives prefer credentialed left-wing activists, and then ends by just baldly asserting that of course the credentialed left-wing activists are better than common sense because "ignorance, error, and tribal narratives are the default state" for common sense, even though the exact same issues are true of the credentialed left-wing activists.
- On Biden's decline; conservatives were pointing it out as far back as 2020; it took YEARS for liberals to stop circling the wagons and accept reality.
- "Very few would have said 'there is no such thing as left-wing antisemitism'" is only true if you count every establishment media outlet, every Dean and Provost on every college campus, and the entirety of Bluesky as the "very few"
- It took until well after the election for every establishment media outlet like the NYT to admit the NYPost reporting was accurate
https://notthebee.com/article/please-enjoy-this-montage-of-left-wing-media-outlets-discrediting-the-totally-real-hunter-biden-laptop-story-back-in-october-2020
https://notthebee.com/article/cbs-news-is-reporting-that-actually-the-hunter-biden-laptop-was-real-you-know-two-years-after-conservative-outlets-used-the-same-process-to-confirm-the-validity-before-the-2020-election
- the CIA and NYT would (belatedly) disagree with you on the likelihood of lab leak
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/03/opinion/covid-lab-leak.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html
- the benefits of Covid vaccines are HEAVILY skewed towards the old, infirm, and those with severe comorbidities. For young healthy adults, Covid was (and remains) a glorified case of the sniffles, so mandating a myocarditis jab to healthy young people so as to prevent a case of the sniffles is the epitome of the cure being worse than the disease. You're still living in the woke delusion bubble on that one.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-19/largest-covid-vaccine-study-yet-finds-links-to-health-conditions
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(21)00066-3/fulltext
https://notthebee.com/article/hey-remember-the-thing-they-said-the-covid-vaccine-totally-wasnt-doing-yeah-a-new-peer-reviewed-study-says-its-happening
https://notthebee.com/article/oh-look-dr-deborah-birx-is-finally-telling-the-truth-about-the-covid-vax
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717
https://notthebee.com/article/former-top-cbs-journalist-catherine-herridge-army-and-national-guard-accused-of-abandoning-24-year-old-soldier-with-debilitating-heart-condition-that-internal-memo-linked-to-covid-19-mrna-vac
https://notthebee.com/article/covid-vaccines-once-again-linked-to-the-thing-that-weve-been-told-theyre-not-at-all-linked-to
As for "all of this is easier said with hindsight" - the problem is conservatives predicted ALL of those adverse outcomes (inflation, learning loss, etc.), and liberals ignored those warnings because "experts know best". Clearly not; all those problems were not only foreseeable, but FORESEEN by conservatives well before they came to pass.
Regarding the border, to only look at terrorism specifically ignores all of the other forms social and economic fallout of years of open border policies. Conservatives could apply similar tunnel vision and say "since Trump retook office in January there hasn't been a single terrorist attack, therefore everything Trump has done has been perfect and wonderful and there have been no downsides whatsoever to any of his decisions or policies"
As I summarized in my article:
"The liberal tendency to be the the last ones to find out about anything that could conceivably make their team look bad has proven to be a potent advantage (not to mention lucrative business opportunity) for conservatives, particularly of the populist variety. On issues ranging from immigration, to housing, to inflation, to crime, to addiction enablement, to all things transgender, conservatives have a tremendous first-mover advantage. They can be first to pitch voters on their solutions to problems because unlike liberals, they’re not wasting years denying those problems exist while smearing anyone attempting to address those problems as a deplorable bigot and/or Threat to Democracy Itself.
The political ascendance of populism can be largely attributed to widespread frustration with years of governance guided by the virtue-signaling political priorities of ivory-tower liberals, who are not only personally insulated from the consequences of their policies, but who subsist on a media diet that systematically curates into oblivion all feedback on how those feelgood policies are actually working out."
https://milesmcstylez.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-the-informed-liberal
The conservatives alleging Biden's decline in 2020 were wrong. He had not declined by then. It didn't take liberals years to catch up to reality, it took reality years to catch up with what conservatives had wishcast while Biden was still giving fiery speeches and outperforming Trump in debates.
You don't get to cite a NYT *opinion* guest essay as evidence that the NYT disagrees with me. Unlike MAGA media, the NYT sometimes publishes opeds it does not agree with. I provided much more detailed evidence summarizing 15 hours of expert debate on this issue.
You are simply mistaken about the vaccines. Believe it or not, old people's lives count too, and herd immunity (read: young people getting vaccinated) is part of what was needed to save them. There were microscopic (under 2 per 10,000 cases) increases in the risk of myocarditis in men under 30, but those increases were *lower* than the increased risk of myocarditis from COVID-19 infection itself, which you called "just the sniffles." And most of those myocarditis cases were also very mild. Even adopting a purely selfish rubric, the risk/reward assessment from those vaccines for young people is clearly positive, and the narrative to the contrary is discredited anti-science hokum.
It's a bit rich to accuse me of being in a bubble when half of your links are to a far-right spin factory called NotTheBee. You are an ideologue blinded by bias in the best case, with a head buried deep in the laziest, sloppiest right-wing media diet. I wish you luck in escaping it.
Biden's administration had to hide his cognitive decline literally from day 1 of his presidency, so by January 2021 he was already a vegetable (and didn't get there overnight)
https://nypost.com/2024/12/19/us-news/white-house-aides-hid-bidens-apparent-mental-decline-from-day-1-of-his-presidency-explosive-report-reveals/
So yes, it did take liberals years to catch up to reality (as it so often does).
Herd immunity is a completely irrelevant factor when the vaccines *don't* prevent infection and *don't* prevent transmission. So no, old people didn't benefit in any way from forcing young people to take the jab.
Similarly, the fact that the vaccines don't prevent infection or transmission means young people did not benefit from getting injected with a vaccine that causes myocarditis at a significantly higher rate than Covid causes hospitalization among young people.
If I get Covid twice, that's 2 myocarditis windows. If I get vaccinated twice and still get Covid twice (because again, the jab doesn't prevent infection), that is now 4 myocarditis windows. For those keeping score, 4 is higher than 2.
I have therefore doubled my myocarditis risk without lowering my infection risk, and the hospitalization risk from Covid for healthy young adults is well below the vaccine myocarditis rate, so symptom reduction is a negligible "benefit".
Did you even read/watch this? Here I'll even cut out notthebee as a middlemand and link to the interview directly. https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/1891690382779470104
So no, the risk/reward does not check out for getting jabbed with the myocarditis juice to prevent sniffles symptoms. I wish I'd been much more of an antivaxxer at the time; I'm now on a waitlist for my 3rd heart surgery in as many years and I'm not even 35 years old yet. Sadly, I made the colossal fuckup of 'trusting the experts'.
If you think notthebee is "far-right", then I'd infer from that you think everyone to the right of AOC is a literal Nazi. Plus, I read both left wing and right wing sources (hence I can also cite New York Times), while you seem to get your news exclusively from NPR and MSNBC. Have fun in your woke bubble I guess, and best of luck with that whole Defund the Police thing. I'm sure it will turn out great.
“The people supporting DEI from 2018-2023 or so were typically well-meaning champions of social justice who got a bit carried away while trying to solve real problems.”
Oh, a bit carried away? This deluded shit is going to get Trump a third term.
I’ll tell you right now I won’t vote for anyone with this opinion for the simple reason that people who can’t admit they made a huge mistake are almost certainly going to make a similar mistake again.
You guys fucked up and disgraced yourself, just admit it and move on.
As huge mistakes that disgrace oneself go, how does DEI compare against attempting a coup to subvert a democratic election, in terms of opinions you won't vote for?
And which similar mistake, if repeated, seems likelier to "get Trump a third term" ?
I didn't fuck up at all, thank you. I didn't get carried away. I just distinguished internet vibes from government policy, and kept those priorities in perspective.
How many genders are there?
As many as we choose to define. Just like how many colors there are. Most people are one of two, though, and there's nothing wrong with that.
I've read a few of these "how DEI overreached" kinds of essays on Substack recently, and for my $0.02, it's less a question of reach as it is a question of nature/tone. "Over/Under reaching" has a teleological undercurrent that I don't think jibes with my thoughts on how this whole thing came undone. For me, it's more a matter of a once-optimistic and hopeful movement metastasizing into a directionless, nihilistic attitude that is both self-reinforcing and self-undermining at the same time.
Self-reinforcing in the way that it de facto treats all criticism or hesitance as a product of and reinforcement of an oppressive status-quo. If you've got reservations about some aspect, then it can only be because of your privilege, white fragility, heterosexism, learned racial biases, or a combination thereof. Even in the event that a person who is themselves marginalized has a contradictory opinion, this is explained away via false consciousness, self-hatred, effect of colonization, etc. It is invalidating and agency-denying while at the same time espousing liberation.
Self-undermining because it is easily gamed, once you know the rhetorical gambit, for ends which directly contradict it. The resistance to and denial of objective truth claims, scientific and logical epistemologies, etc, and general descent into postmodern nihilistic jargon makes it pretty easy for people like Steve Bannon to cynically co-opt the rhetorical framework to say basically, "you're right, it's all about power, and you all have that now in the domain of culture, so are now the oppressive status-quo". This is exactly how the rebel left became the progressive version of Maude Flanders, and the Alex Keatons of the world became the new radicals and rebels. Social Justice liberalism embraced the worst parts of Critical Theory (the endlessly pedantic circular critique, and solipsistic denial of any base for shared truth) because it was rhetorically convenient in order to undermine the previous order, but in doing so they also painted themselves into a corner with no productive endgame. Just endless performative self-flagellation.
Couple this with the classically toxic social media zeitgeist of flamewars, cancel campaigns, call-out culture, and general enshittification, and it all just took on a really sour aura. It also did all of this while...not actually accomplishing much of anything material. The culture has genuinely changed such that younger people I think are generally more open to cultures beyond their own, but it's hard to know how permanent that change will be as Gen Z/Alpha matures and grows into whatever sociopolitical zeitgeist they will become.
I think the last point is what makes me really "meh" about the question of whether "wokeness" was an "overreach". For it to be that it would have had to have materially changed something in a very profound way, not just in vibes. Vibes change all the time.
https://abcnews4.com/news/local/trumps-dei-ban-hits-home-ashley-hall-girls-stem-event-cancelled-donald-trump-diversity-equity-inclusion-wciv-abc-news-4-02-11-2025
The reason DEI is so disliked is the small, day to day ways in which in intrudes on people’s daily life in their work world. Maybe I will bring myself to write or comment about it.
It’s what the cool kids in progressive circles would call microagression 😉🤷🏽♂️