Forbidden Anti-Woke Truths At Bari Weiss's Forbidden Anti-Woke Truth-iversity REVEALED!

It's a safe space for rightwingers who say safe spaces are bad, with freewheeling debates among people who all agree.

I may be more irritated by that second caption’s formal ‘it is’ than I should be.

The University of Austin (UATX), the venture-capital-stuffed effort to save higher education, and America itself, from wokeness and leftist indoctrination through rigorous indoctrination in free-enterprise mantras and rightwing cultural grievance, will start offering its first actual university classes this fall, although the place still isn’t accredited.

In the interim, as Noah Rawlings writes in a witty profile at The New Inquiry, the outfit is capitalizing off its “Intellectual Dark Web” founders’ self-congratulatory outlaw reputations by offering week-long mini-courses labeled “Forbidden Courses.” Sounds edgy!

The brief seminars by rightwing thought leaders expose young conservatives to the dangerous truths that are too hot for conventional universities to handle, free of the Thought Police and Cancel Culture! Just like you ‘d find them on Twitter, but far more expensive. Mostly, as Rawlings found, the cutting-edge forbidden rebel ideas amount to justifying why those with the most wealth and power in America should continue to have all the wealth and power, but now with computers.

Since the University of Austin doesn’t actually have a campus in Austin yet, the “anti-woke summer camp” classes are held at “Old Parkland,” a Dallas office park dressed up in kitschy neoclassical decor and owned by Clarence Thomas’s best billionaire pal Harlan Crow. An awestruck fellow student marvels to Rawlings, “It’s like something Trump would build.” Oh, yes, in so many ways.

The atmosphere is clubby, Rawlings writes, by intention, and only for the very best intellectual giants:

If, one noon day, you were to take a cursory look at the cafeteria of Old Parkland, it would become clear what kind of person belonged to the club, what kind did not. Black and Latino workers would be cooking and serving food. A flock of white men in suits and pastel polos, most of them employed by venture capital firms, would be eating and chatting.

And then there are Rawlings’ fellow students (all pseudonymous for reporting purposes), who span the full breadth of the the conservative elite:

There was James, who studied computer science. Then there was Cameron, who also studied computer science. David and Peter studied computer science, while Luke and Albert studied computer science. As for Mike and Jason, the former studied computer science, whereas the latter studied computer science. Ethan was not unlike Max, in that both studied computer science. Some people studied business, too.

The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room. The way these percentages diverge from national higher education averages should tell you something about what kind of intellectual community UATX is building. In practice, UATX is recruiting a student body whose racial and gender makeup resembles a pre-civil rights university.

There is much talk of wrestling with grand ideas, of engaging in dialogue in an atmosphere of intellectual liberty you’d never find in a mainstream university, because here, everyone is a bold freethinking capitalist who hates wokeness. Or at least there’s a lot of talk about wrestling with ideas in an intellectually rigorous debate, if not any actual debate.

In the “Sexual Politics” Forbidden Course Rawlings took, taught by Lady Against Feminism Katie Roiphe, students were dared to confront dangerous ideas like "

“Women are more complicated than men.” “There are things that women want that they don’t like that they want.” “With boys, their bodies and their desires are one.”

And also to understand that everything is complex, not simple. Truth is complicated, and so is sexual politics, very complex, and perceptions, my heavens, can change because of all the complexity. It’s really heady, complex stuff that allows so much hedging that you may as well not bother charging anyone with rape:

Take, for example, a question Roiphe likes to contemplate in her writing and teaching. Is he at fault, because he assaulted her, or is she, because she drank too much and passed out? To refuse to decide on that question is, in effect, to allow the consequences of the second interpretation—exoneration—to unfold. What such heroic indecision often amounts to, in practice, is a craven reaffirmation of the powers that be.

In addition to the seminars, there were other classes where reactionary talking points are delivered with the assurance that they were very bold and countercultural, because returning to the social order of an imagined pre-liberal America (a great one) is the real revolution. People should be sorted by IQ, and eugenics is the best genics. For all the talk of debate, everyone sure agreed a lot.

The highlight was a talk by Bari Weiss herself, who left the New York Times so it couldn’t cancel her, and who did some world-class iconoclasm by expressing the same rightwing tropes that her audience already believes. Take that, wokesters!

Delivered with the uncanny hypersincerity of a bad actor, her speech was a jumble. On the one hand, she was careful to assert her identity: “I’m gay. I’m Jewish,” she began. On the other hand, she praised UATX for being a place “to separate identity from ideas.” On the one hand, she made good use of the freewheeling frontier imagery that is popular with techheads like Joe Lonsdale, saying that “we’re living in a time that requires new pioneers,” such as the good people who enter “the Wild West world of podcasting.” On the other, she told us that we also needed the “genuinely safe space” that UATX provides, disregarding that UATX’s Academic Programs Manager had recently promised the school would “permit no safe spaces.”

As we always say, go read the whole thing. It’s bound to shock you with how performatively controversial all these rich people (and their aspirational allies) are, congratulating each other for knowing that they are the real creators and freethinkers, marching boldly into the familiar and conventional.

We’ll leave you with this quote about jiu-jitsu from Peter Boghossian, who used to teach at Portland State University, but then he left because it was a “social justice factory,” and now he is safely esconced in the forbidden safe space place:

“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.

Just wait until he tells you about “street epistemology.” It’s the other thing he does, Rawlings explains, on top of all the jiu-jitsu.

[The New Inquiry / Also at the Wayback Machine, because “server”]

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[New Inquiry]

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