What's the line between academic
theory and conspiracy theory?
Before every intellectual starts
yelling at me about how their study involves research and deep study and not to
put them in with the Alex Jones and Joe Rogans of America I need to be very
clear that I've read my share of right wing and left wing academic works over
the years and I can tell you with the certainty of a child of an academic both
sides can use research to fit their political ends. I've lost count of how many
right-wing studies I've seen arguing that FDR had links to Communism that
explain why the New Deal was created and why it never worked, why the Great
Society was just a smokescreen for LBJ to get blacks to always vote Democrat
without thinking and that the real reason Nixon was impeached had to do with
his plan to expand the government in his second term and Watergate had nothing
to do with it. These are just as nuts as any theory I've read from Oliver Stone
from the last thirty years in which he believes the deep state had Kennedy
killed to benefit the military-industrial complex.
So many educated people – most of
them left-wing – have a spent a lot of time bemoaning how so much of America
has fallen sway to the conspiracy theories of the right. And I could take them
more seriously had I not spent much of Biden's administration reading Daily
Kos, a progressive site that spent so many of its articles coming up with its
own conspiracy theories as to why so many Americans had become stupid enough to
believe the gospel of Fox News and Republicans rather than the warm embrace of
collectivism preached by Bernie and AOC which was the correct theory of
government that was of course being suppressed by the rich and the special
interests. You know, rational stuff.
As always progressives never ask
the right question which is why do the masses embrace the conservative
conspiracy theory of government, which are complete BS, instead of the
socialist conspiracy theory of government, which are correct. (Yes I left the
Democratic Party out of the equation. I'm getting to that.) The short answer is
simple: right wing theories have always
been able to help political parties in America then left wing ones. That has
been true for 200 years and its still true today. And a large part of it is
that right-wing theories are easier to match with the extreme views of people
then left-wing ones.
Let's say, for example, it's 2012
and Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity is talking about how if Obama is reelected
it will bring about the destruction of America because he is a Kenyan communist.
If he were to bring, say, George Will or Bret Stephens (back then full-throated
members of conservative think tanks) they would be able to describe how Obama's
first term is all about creeping socialism, that he is bringing around Sharia
Law, and all the worst things the right already thinks. Because this audience
is inclined to vote Republican, it can be used to attack Democrats and help
Republicans.
But if Rachel Maddow or Chris
Matthews wants to defend Obama's first term, she couldn't bring in someone like
Noam Chomsky or Nikole Hannah-Jones to do that because their writings argue
that there's no real difference between the two political parties. They will
cheerfully attack Republicans if they're paid to do so but not long after
they'll write articles arguing that Obama is just the latest example of
neoliberalism engaged in protecting Wall Street and expanding American Empire.
(Oliver Stone in fact used the final episode of 'Untold History of the
United States which aired during Obama's administration essentially making
that argument in the final episode.) Many of them no doubt at the time would
have attacked Bernie Sanders because he caucused with the Democrats as having
'sold out'.
So at the most cynical level the
reason left-wing theories are not popular with the masses is because of
marketing. The right-wing academic can easily frame its theories to sell to the
people and his elected officials who'll buy into it because it offers a solution.
The left-wing academic is essentially still selling their product to a far more
intellectual group of academics which is by definition smaller and less
political.
I was reminded of this by two
articles I read in the New York Times within 24 hours last week. Both were
written by two prominent left-wing academics: Nikole Hannah-Jones and Roxanne
Gay. Both are African-American female academics who even by the standards of
left-wing academia are incredibly left-wing and therefore very
successful. In other words they have become rich and successful in America by
pointing out in great detail why America is a failure and how everybody is
failing America. )Apparently irony is not something they study.) And like
almost every other African-American academic who has become successful they
take a certain pleasure in writing about how American has always failed
minorities and women can never do anything to make things better for them, and
have sold many, many books arguing that point.
In 24 hours I read how
Hannah-Jones and Gay looked at two major problems – systemic racism and the
crisis in Gaza – and how they thought each could be solved. Naturally because
Western Civilization is racist, favoring the patriarchy and white supremacy
neither mentioned even the idea that institutions such as democracy or diplomacy
could resolve these deep problems. And of course as with all these kinds of
works it is implied that these problems are solvable but that 'they' – whoever 'they'
you want to use – lack the will to do so.
That these problems may not in truth be solvable is not considered by an
academics who work only in the classroom and have little to know involvement
with putting their theories into practice. And such things as economic or
political process can't solve them.
No what both Hannah-Jones and Gay
chose to argue is that old hoary chestnut: raising awareness. Like the
overwhelming majority of left-wing thinkers they truly believe the problems today
are not solved because the masses are unaware of it. That their writing by
definition is meant for a niche audience as well as the fact that much of their
writing argues the masses are sheep anyway is a contradiction they ignore. The
fact that the masses might care about things that they don't care about – like say,
paying their rent and their bills – is not something they are able to
comprehend despite all of their talk about wealth inequality but that's a
subject for a different essay.
Those of you who read my article
know all too well what Hannah-Jones wrote about. In her article: In
Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? Hannah-Jones
explained in great detail how her decision to put her daughter Najya in an
integrated public school rather then a segregated private school ended up doing
nothing to help the problem within that school and that her own child's
education suffered as a result. I considering that article self-aggrandizing
and self-promoting as Hannah-Jones seemed to have exploited her daughter a
decade ago for her own cache among her colleagues and was doing the exact same
thing today, with no apparent growth or self-awareness on her part. She openly
compared herself to the parents of Ruby Bridges and her classmates, even though
she fully acknowledged that she came from a far wealthier history and had
benefited from their sacrifices. She was unapologetic about how she had used
her five year old daughter – who was in no position to consent – and how when
it came to choosing between her daughter and her values, she spent six years
choosing her values.
Since
the article came out on Sunday Hannah-Jones has become the target of the
right-wing media which I really do think was part of the point of Hannah-Jones
publishing this article. When Fox News and the New York Post choose to call out
a prominent left-wing scholar or Democratic politician it has the magical
effect among liberal and Democrats of erasing the message because of the messenger.
This is a method that has worked for Hannah-Jones in the past with the Times
before. Prior to the publication of The 1619 Project multiple
historians had argued against it because of the cherry picking and the twisted
versions of leftist academia and presentist thinking. For whatever reason the
Times chose to publish and when Trump and the right wing attacked it Hannah-Jones
was essentially insulated because of who she was being attacked by. Magically all
the very real criticisms could be put under the label of racism and
conservatism and she ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize and multiple awards. All
of the criticisms of her work, which have not ended, have become background
noise.
Najya
Hannah-Jones will soon be going to college and I suspect will have many things
to say when asked about her experience. She may even write them herself. So I suspect her mother published last week's
essay as a kind of damage control and preemptive strike. That article was not
about her daughter's struggles and how she contributed to them; it was about
her using her arguments to get ahead of this. And it worked. This is no longer
about what her daughter went through because of Nikole Hannah-Jones parenting;
it's about systemic racism and whether you want to be on the right side of history
or Fox News.
And
it masks the arrogance of a woman who truly believed that she could almost
single-handedly improve a public school where decades of liberal government had
failed. It was clear as early as first grade to the rest of the parents who'd
come with her that it was a fait accompli and it was also clear to Hannah-Jones
how badly the system was failing. But Hannah-Jones makes it clear that when it
came to the problems of this particular school, she alone could fix it. Like
any extremist conservative confronted with failure Hannah-Jones chose to double
down and only backed away when her daughter confronted her on it. Her article,
while better punctuated and more literate then the average Truth Social Tweet,
is just as defiant about her position: she didn't fail her daughter, the system
did. Perhaps Najya should use this article for the therapy she's definitely
going to be spending years as an adult paying for.
Not
24 hours after this I read Roxanne Gay's piece about Ed Sheeran and the
controversy surrounding his latest tour. I'm not going to recount it here
because by this point everybody and
their Irish uncle has heard about it and Gay really didn't have anything
original to say about it. And while I read Hannah-Jones article with a
gathering sage of rage, I read Gay's with the constant belief "Am I
reading the Times or The Onion?"
Because
right in the center of it Gay actually wrote: "With the exception of a relative
few such as Mark Ruffalo, most celebrities don't use their platforms to
raise sufficient awareness." And I could only think: "Girl, if
this is them not being sufficient, I'd hate to see them in they met your
standards."
This
isn't the first time I've read such an article: over the last year I've read in
some reviews of the Emmys and the Oscars for being 'insufficiently political'
as if that were a condemnation rather then something to be celebrated. By this
point you'd think Gay would know that celebrity awareness does nothing to solve
problems. Remember last February when everyone at the Grammys was telling ICE
to go F--- itself because of what was happening in Minneapolis? And every left
wing thinker cheered Billie Eilish for saying "No one's illegal on stolen
land."
The
Times published an article this past week arguing that during the summer ICE
deportations are just as high with numbers greater then in 2025. So it doesn't
seem like all the awareness raised at the Grammys did a single thing to stop
it. But it's not like celebrities have been paying as much attention to it this
summer anyway because the administration has been less showy and more organized
then it was during 2025. Either way, the awareness of it has done zip to change
policy.
Nor
did Gay mention the organization Artists4Ceasefire which was founded two weeks
after October 7th 2023 and has a fairly sizable membership bigger
than Mark Ruffalo. And while this article was published before Netanyahu's
appearance at the UN last week where Hannah Einbinder and Susan Sarandon were
arrested protesting his appearance (though its not like they need an excuse to
protest period) at this point in time it's harder for me to find a celebrity
that hasn't taken the gospel position that Gay has on Gaza.
Like
Hannah-Jones' Gay's article is based on a false construct even more flawed than
hers. The problems that are happening in the Middle East have not been solved
because singers like Ed Sheeran have spent too much time singing and recording
albums and not raising awareness about Gaza. Even writing that sentence down
makes you wonder about the sanity of Gay if she thinks that this is how the
world works, but having spent enough time among the left on this site and
others that's how they see the world on everything.
Both
Hannah-Jones and Gay are essentially arguing that the problems with America and
the world are too important that they can be left in the hands of the people
who are qualified to deal with them. Their version of the world is one where
all decision operate on a simple and binary moral calculus which everyone but
them has failed. And obviously we can't trust the proletariat to solve the
problems of today because they're dumb and racist and have been brainwashed by
the wrong sort of elitists. To them democracy is too important to be left in
the hand of the voters and foreign policy to important to be left in the hands
of the diplomats.
No
the only people who can solve it are left-wing millionaires, educated people in
Hannah-Jones reading, celebrities in
Gay's. And even if they are unable to solve these systemic problems
because they are unqualified at every level, it is far more dangerous if they
don't make even token efforts to please left-wing thinkers like the author's of
these columns. Gay, I should mention, thinks Sheeran is a lousy singer anyway
and probably hates Macklemore's music with a passion but I assume she likes him
more because of his politics.
I can't help but wonder how much
of this is based on the level of education and race more than anything else.
These same people, had they watched any number of Fox News speakers rant 'Obama's
not a real American', they'd have dismissed him outright. But if those same
speakers had said: "Obama's not a real liberal" would they
have changed the channel so fast?
I'd say that Hannah-Jones and Gay
have lost the plot when it comes to how to fix problems of America were it not
for the very fact their wealth and success come by writing how they are unfixable.
Hannah-Jones is not humbled by her experience and Gay seems as unaware as
anyone in a right-wing media thread how little connection she has to even the
world of the left-wing. And because both are African-American women, criticisms
of their writings no matter how legitimate can be labeled as ''racist' and 'sexist',
almost all of that defense no doubt coming from educated white people first and
foremost.
Their writings will be read by
the highbrow readers of The New York Times and criticized and torn apart
by those on Fox News and other media. Hannah-Jones and Gay will receive accolades
from one group and abuse from the other, leading to them getting more rich and
famous. The problems they raised will remain unsolved despite their efforts to
raise awareness. And the average American will continue to ignore all of it
focused on such minor details as getting through the day and paying their
bills.
And next month, despite the
efforts of Hannah-Jones and Gay to raise awareness, the overwhelming majority of
Americans will cast their votes based not on Gaza nor systemic racism but the real
issue of this election: affordability an issue that stopped being important to
either of these scholars years ago and that they can only comprehend in the
same abstractions that make up the lion's share of their writing. Perhaps
they'll vote, perhaps they won't. Regardless they'll complain within days or
weeks of the election how America has failed yet again depending on what
current trivia or reality touches their fancies. And the endless theorizing
about how America needs to do something will continue from this, free from the
possibility of ever conceivably being put into practice.
See capitalism does work.
Where else could you get rich saying your country has failed you? As another
famous African-American said: "Only in America."
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