There's Probably Nothing We Can Do About This Awful Deepfake Porn Problem

we built a global instantaneous communications network, and we're going to keep on living with the consequences I recently was on the podcast What Could Go Right?, which you can check out here. One of the very first posts I did for this newsletter was an argument that we can’t (as in, are unable to in real-world terms) censor far-right content online because of the basic reality of modern communications technology. The internet makes the transmission of information, no matter how ugly or shocking or secret, functionally impossible to stop. Digital infrastructure is spread out across the globe, including in regimes that do not play ball with American legal or corporate mandates, and there’s plenty of server racks out there in the world buzzing along that are inaccessible to even the most dedicated hall monitors. You can exclude certain people or certain messages or certain types of content from certain networks. But we have no ability to simply prevent the transmission of bits that someone really want to transmit, and in that piece I named a lot of examples, as well as showing that even in the pre-internet era actually stamping out extremist ideas proved to be impossible. To pick a salient example, Alex Jones has reached a huge audience and raked in tens of millions of dollars since he was supposedly “deplatformed” years ago. Because you can’t stop the spread of communication in the 21st century, even when you really, really want to. What’s funny is how many times that piece has been referred to angrily by people who simply refuse to accurately understand its thesis. So, so many responses to that piece have said “look, Freddie deBoer says we shouldn’t censor Nazis!” I have in fact been named in some of the endless number of (subscription-harvesting) anti-Substack pieces in that way, as an example of someone who thinks we shouldn’t censor extremist content. Well, it happens that I am one of those free speech absolutists, yes, but that is very explicitly not what the piece argues - it’s precisely an argument that whether we should censor is entirely moot, because we can’t. The technological impediments to cutting off the flow of information (at least that which is not tightly controlled at the supply-side) are now existential. The establishment governments of the world were unable to stop ISIS from effortlessly spreading their propaganda at the height of the international campaign to stop them; I promise, you can’t stop people from spreading (say) pseudoscientific racism online. This is a reality people have to accept, even if - especially if - they think that reality is corrosive and ugly. I suspect it’s a similar story with all of this horrible AI “deepfake” celebrity porn. It’s awful, we should absolutely work to keep it off major networks and platforms to whatever extent we can, and it’s likely literally impossible to stop it from spreading entirely, given the structure of the modern internet. It’s terrible, but this is the world we’ve made. The trouble is that, as I’ve seen again and again, in this era of entitlement people think saying “we can’t do this” necessarily means “I don’t want to.”... © 2024 Fredrik deBoer 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

February Call for Subscriber Writing, Reader Q&A, and the Book Review Contest Winners

I beg of you to follow the submission instructions Hello folks, as I announced yesterday, the 2023 book review contest winners have been chosen and contacted. Congratulations to winner Alicia Kenworthy and runners up Hal Johnson and Ethan Spiegelman! Look for Alicia’s review to run in this newsletter in the next several weeks. People have been asking me to do a print Q&A thing here for forever, so here you go: I’m soliciting questions for a Q&A here on whatever topic might interest you. I will answer the questions I feel like answering, as many as I can without the post getting excessively long. If you want to ask a question, please do so by replying directly to this email. There is no requirement that you be a paying subscriber for this. I’ll try to get the post out before the end of February. Also, it’s time for our (now practically-speaking bi-) monthly call for subscriber writing. Let me take a moment to let new people know what this is all about, reiterate what it isn’t, and make a much-needed reminder of the format. Every(ish) month, I present an opportunity for subscribers to share some of their writing with my mailing list of ~50,000 readers. This is a subscriber perk, and it’s also something I really love to do because I’m very passionate about writing and writers and want to help people who are trying to build an audience. I emphasize that this is for sharing subscriber writing, not your podcast, your Twitch stream, or your Instagram. One thing that I have to reiterate here is that this is the opportunity to link to writing that’s already hosted elsewhere; it’s not, as some people assume, an opportunity to actually post your work here. If you’re looking for someplace to host your writing, why not start a free Wordpress or Substack, or use another blogging or newsletter service? Then you can link your work here. I’ve had more than a dozen readers tell me that they meaningfully expanded their audience through this service before. Here’s what I am now just begging for you to do, if you take advantage of this opportunity: please, please, please, use the following format to submit your work. Please. Every time only about half of submissions are in the proper format. It looks like this: Bolded Name or Pseudonym, Title of Your Work with Link Synopsis of your work of one or two (at most!) sentences So in practice that looks like Freddie deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement A book about the elite capture that has neutered our progressive social movements I understand that some people think they’re helping when they do things like this: Name: Questo the Wizard Title: “Spells That Make You Horny” Link: http://questothebesto.org/horny Synopsis: A grimoire of useful cantrips to get your motor running But that isn’t helping; it’s taking a 30-second process of copying and pasting the exact format above and turning it into a five minute process of putting down each individual element in the right place and inserting the link and bolding the thing that should be bolded and taking italics off of the things that shouldn’t be italicized…. I implore you, guys, make this easier for me. It’s more backend work than you think. Please see here for more details about these posts and make sure to email me at fredrik.deboer@gmail.com. I search for these submissions using that alternate email address, so you’re significantly increasing the chance I’ll miss yours if you don’t use it! Deadline for this month is Friday, February 9th! If I messed up previously and promised to include your entry in a later edition, please email to remind me! If you submitted something before the submission period began, submit it again! And if you don’t use the fredrik.deboer@gmail.com address, I have no sympathy if I fail to include you. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Yes, I do check your email against the emails on the subscriber list, so if you’re emailing from a different one, point me to your subscribed email. Non-subscribers, if you want to take advantage of this forum to share your work, you know what to do. Freddie deBoer © 2024 Fredrik deBoer 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

The New World Struggles to be Born, The Old World Struggles to Keep Padding Its Resume a meandering consideration of the industry I ostensibly belong to

The book review contest winners have been picked. Congratulations to winner Alicia Kenworthy and runners-up Hal Johnson and Ethan Spiegelman! I will be reaching out to the winners individually by email today to arrange payment. There will be a brief post soon with more details, along with the call for February’s subscriber writing submissions. (Yes, folks.) Thanks for everybody’s patience. Choosing was harder than ever before, and it was already hard the past few times. I hate hate hate choosing. I really do. Except for those of you who blew past the word count limit, you were easy to reject, doing me a favor. Anyway, I’m thinking we’re gonna do a straight raffle or something else this year, I can’t take the guilt. I don’t know, I gotta think about it. OK on with the show. I found this little item in The Atlantic from a few weeks ago to be an amusing volley in an old war. It’s part of a long lineage of establishment publications working to guard whatever lingering sense of superiority they have left, from a writer named Kaitlyn Tiffany. Substack, which got its start by offering mainstream journalists lucrative profit-sharing arrangements, has embraced a Muskian set of free-speech principles: As Jonathan Katz reported for The Atlantic last month, the company’s leadership is unwilling to remove avowed Nazis from its platform. (In a statement published last week, Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, said, “We don’t like Nazis either,” but he and his fellow executives are “committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.”) The trajectory of both resembles that of Rumble, which started out as a YouTube alternative offering different monetization options for creators, then pulled itself far to the political fringes and has been very successful. First, this appears to contains a flat factual inaccuracy: it’s simply historical incorrect to say that Substack “got its start by offering mainstream journalists lucrative profit-sharing arrangements.” Substack’s core financial arrangement is to host newsletters and handle payment integration, in return for which Substack takes a percentage of subscription revenues; this is only “profit-sharing” in the loosest and least-accurate sense. (Am I also “profit-sharing” with Stripe? Are grocery stores profit-sharing with Mastercard? Am I profit-sharing with the government when I pay income taxes?) I suspect that this is a reference, instead, to Substack’s brief, much-maligned period of offering advances to people (like me) to entice us onto the platform and make it seem more viable for serious writerer types. If I had to guess, I’d say that the Substack leadership team regrets ever starting that program. They more than made their money back on most of the deals they made, as I understand it, but the PR ended up being awful - in large part because of the busy work of people at places like The Atlantic, which have been trying to stamp out this sort of independent competition for as long as paid newsletters have been a thing. Besides, Substack became a thoroughly conventional place to write in the past couple of years, dead-tree media be damned, and I don’t think they offer any advances at all anymore. Either way, Substack started in 2017, the first advances went out in 2020, and before that happened there were already writers on the platform making six figures a year. To suggest that poaching through advances created the platform is the kind of factual inaccuracy places like The Atlantic are supposed to avoid. If that’s not what Tiffany is suggesting, then she’s got a profoundly expansive definition of profit-sharing... Freddie deBoer © 2024 Fredrik deBoer 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

About Marianne Eloise's Response to My Review of Her Memoir, Obsessive Intrusive Magical Thinking

I want to apologize for not having a substantive subscriber-only piece today. Something I have been working on was scuttled by developing events, and I’ve also been caught up with a big important post for Monday. I will have two subscriber-only posts next week, one on Wednesday and one on Friday. A couple of years ago I wrote a review of Marianne Eloise’s memoir Obsessive, Intrusive, Magical Thinking for UnHerd; you can read the piece here. I did not think much of the book, a memoir that was published when its subject was 28 years old, and said so in the review. (Generally speaking, that is the purpose of reviews, to say what you think.) This past September I posted on the Goodreads page for the book, linking to my original review, as many do. This is, obviously, the function of a Goodreads page, to house community reviews of books. Eloise has responded by accusing me of an inappropriate fixation on her and factual inaccuracy, which are accusations I take seriously. I had hoped you would grow out of your fixation on me but considering you’re posting this a year and a half after the original piece, that seems unlikely! Couple of massive factual errors alongside the weird personal attacks in this piece: - I have never done “loads of drugs” nor does it say I have in the book. Maybe a reading comprehension issue? - I never moved to LA to become an actor - I have never dealt with alcohol abuse - I never shopped around for a diagnosis. I saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed me after multiple days speaking to me and my parent. I barely discuss this process in the book or any difficulties I had growing up because it’s none of your business! I am a happy autistic adult. I am also happily recovered from OCD and some other issues named in the book. I never once say in the book that I have a bunch of ailments I don’t want to cure, but either way it’s not really affecting you. Get well soon! I am genuinely surprised by some of these, as they are demonstrably false - I have a searchable copy of the PDF of her book right in front of me. I want to take these claims one by one. First, let’s address the simple claims of factual inaccuracy. - I never once say in the book that I have a bunch of ailments I don’t want to cure There is very little else in the book other than recounting mysterious medical problems and expressing ambivalence about them. Page 177: I stopped eating, really. Everything that passed my lips was meticulously recorded, and I spent hours scrolling through pro-anorexic forums and Tumblr blogs for ideas and motivation. I took cruel photos of my own body that I used to compare with myself, exercising every second I wasn’t working or doing my schoolwork. I withdrew from my friends, avoiding any social occasion that might mean consumption and I committed to my blossoming eating disorder with the diligence of a pious saint Page 13: I’ve had chronic migraines since around the time I started school; blinding, debilitating episodes that made my nose bleed and sent me to bed for days. While these are under better control now, I can’t recall a single headache-free day in my life. Very recently, I was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a genetic disorder common in autistic people. It affects our connective tissues, and basically means that I’ve felt as if I have the bones, muscles and joints of someone much older for a long time. These things have never not been with me, but in the winter, they all conspire to put me totally out of action. Page xvi: I will never be able to think about anything once or in a linear, not all-consuming way. It’s all or nothing, baby, it’s Scalextric or it falls straight out of my ears and into a lake below. So I embrace it. My obsessions, especially my special interests, saved my ass through a difficult childhood and a painful adolescence. If I wasn’t able to hyper-fixate on topics, particularly movies and TV, I wouldn’t have a Master’s degree and something some people call ‘a career’. I have ADHD and I’m lazy. I’m a shit student and a worse employee. Without obsession, I have nothing. It’s taken me on journeys across the world in pursuit of the things that interest me, and it always wins against the things that I find hard about being alive Literally, “I embraced this disorder” is right there on the page. - I have never done “loads of drugs” nor does it say I have in the book. Maybe a reading comprehension issue? Perhaps this one was somewhat garbled in the editing process so that illegal drugs and Eloise’s many medications became confused, in which case that is one regret I do have - I can see that the sentence implies a lot of illegal drug use, which is not fair. I would amend that line if possible. There is instead a lot of talk about general licentiousness: Page 54: I was a walking cliché of a naughty, unhappy teen, a veritable bingo card: self-harm, drinking, smoking, skipping school. There’s certainly a lot of drugs in terms of medications, as Eloise herself states Page 179: I have tried every medication, every treatment, every cure She does smoke weed, which of course is no big deal, but is worth mentioning: Page 216: We played video games, and drank, and smoked weed, and rolled around in the grass on the Berkeley campus at sunset, whistling through grass and laughing.' - I never moved to LA to become an actor Page 89: I first saw acting as a way to get to LA, so I threw myself into it. So… yeah. The entire chapter “City of Angels” is about trying to make it in LA. There’s also some Hollywood namedropping, such as page 102, “The next morning, my most unlikely of friends, PJ, better known as Johnny Knoxville, texts me.” - I have never dealt with alcohol abuse Page 78: He touched our water bottles full of vodka and coke, but in his lack of diligence or perhaps a small kindness, he didn’t open them to have a sniff. Page 99: We pick up some vodka and cigarettes and pack, quickly, but the two guys have little patience for my dithering and sack of toiletries Page 263: I started drinking and shoplifting and skiving school and all the other things bad kids do. I ran out of places to hide. Etc. - I never shopped around for a diagnosis. I saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed me after multiple days speaking to me and my parent. I barely discuss this process in the book or any difficulties I had growing up because it’s none of your business! This one is quite inscrutable - the book is almost nothing else than a discussion of the great difficulties she had growing up; the entire memoir is built out of what she here says is none of the reader’s business. The majority of the text in the book is devoted to those exact difficulties. It’s such a transparent falsehood that I hardly know how to being - just consult the opening chapters and you’ll find the whole thing is about “difficulties I had growing up.” To pick one sentence that puts the lie to that idea, I could go with this sentence, referring to a period in her young adulthood: Page 94: I had struggled to reconcile my complicated past with having any kind of future, and it had taken everything in me just to not die. As for the claim that she never said that she shopped around for a diagnosis, here: Page xv: After years of struggling at work, I sought a diagnosis, and I got one. And, in the New York Times: I expected to be ambivalent [about a diagnosis], but I wasn’t: I was euphoric… After pursuing it for five years, the diagnosis gave me certainty, solidity and the strength to articulate my needs to others. I looked back on the past anew, seeing my own behavior through a softer lens and pinpointing where others could have been kinder. I do not quite know what to do with a woman who directly acknowledges pursuing a diagnosis for five years but also denies ever engaging in diagnosis shopping. I can’t decide if this is deception or delusion. Now for the overall complaint of fixation. I find this claim unsupportable and unfair. Having never heard of Eloise or her book, I was commissioned by UnHerd to review the memoir. I said yes because I am a writer, I frequently write about mental illness, and they paid me money. Meanwhile, Eloise is an adult professional who wrote a professionally-published book, put out by a legitimate publishing house. By definition her work is subject to review, including critical review. None of this amounts to fixation. Later that year I mentioned the review in my post “The Gentrification of Disability,” because Eloise’s memoir so perfectly fits in with a vision of mental illness that I think is insidious and destructive. That’s how this works! You write a book to share ideas with the world, and a consequence is that other people interact with those ideas, including in ways that you wouldn’t enjoy. It happens to me all the time. To publish a review because I was paid to do so, link to that review in a future piece on similar topics, and years later using Goodreads as it is intended to be used by sharing my review there - that cannot constitute fixation. The review is linked here, and you can agree with it or disagree with it. If you feel strongly enough, you can write a piece taking it down, go for it. My overall problems with Obsessive Intrusive Magical Thinking are simple. It advances the now-inescapable vision of mental illness and neurological disorders as adorable quirks that help people live fuller and more adventurous lives, rather than as debilitating illnesses that cause deep human suffering This perspective is made more frustrating and insufferable by Eloise’s immense material privilege - her parents are obviously wealthy and the book amounts to a series of journeys she takes all across the world without any care for the expense involve, while so many people out there struggle under the weight of crushing psychiatric and neurological disorders that they lack the resources to treat The entire book is premised on the popular but incorrect notion that being autistic, or having any other neurological or developmental or psychiatric condition, is inherently interesting, when that is never the case; only the expression of these conditions can be interesting in the hands of a skilled and self-aware creator. Obsessive Intrusive Magical Thinking did not meet the standards of skill or self-awareness that I have as a reader. Here’s a fairly typical passage. Page 216: In the mornings, I sunbathed and walked to Whole Foods and FaceTimed my new boyfriend, feeling the gap between England and California close. In the afternoons, I went to the comedy festival, where I felt more me than I had in months, indulging the person I was and the things I liked. One night, I watched comedy band The Lonely Island, laughing in a crowd alone as they brought out Michael Bolton and T-Pain. This, and many more moments like it, in a book which takes as its central premise that Eloise has suffered to a degree so great that her story deserves to be captured in a memoir, written when she was barely more than a quarter-century old. On page 187, returning to a central motif, she writes “I will always be in pain, and I will always resent having a tether to this earth at all.” Well, that’s human, and of course pain itself can be worthy of capturing in a book, no matter what’s causing that pain or how privileged the author is. You can certainly write a book with that theme no matter how rich you are or what conditions you may have. But you have to do it well. I just think you wrote a shitty book and that your vision of mental illness is corrosive, Marianne, that’s all. The only fixation at play here is yours for yourself. A lot of people seemed to like the book; meanwhile I’m just one obscure and largely-disgraced writer. You are still writing your story. I will read your next book with interest, but I hope you’ll take my sincere advice: write about something, anything, other than yourself. Freddie deBoer. © 2024 Fredrik deBoer 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

What We Might Mean by "Liberal Bias"

What We Might Mean by "Liberal Bias" FREDDIE DEBOER JAN 21 For years now, liberal activists have called for the media to abandon the notion of journalistic objectivity as typically defined, which is to say, the idea that good reporting makes people equally mad and strives to be “balanced” between opposing political viewpoints. This “View From Nowhere,” to use the liberal media critic Jay Rosen’s term, implies the existence of a space free from any ideological influence or preexisting biases, which obviously can’t exist in real life and thus puts reporters in an untenable position. Worse, the story goes, the desire to be evenhanded leaves journalists (whose job it is to report the truth) in he-said/she-said dichotomies that imply that one perspective is as true as another even when one side is clearly lying or wrong. The archetypal example of the View From Nowhere resulting in malign consequences might be climate change - “Democrats Insist Burning Fossil Fuels Leads to Global Warming, But Republicans Are Skeptical.” As people like Rosen have pointed out for forever, this type of framing suggests to the reader that both sides are equally valid, when in fact only the former is remotely in line with overwhelming scientific evidence. Better, the argument goes, to simply make clear that the facts are on the side of the Democrats here, not the Republicans. And you saw a lot of movement in this direction during the Trump administration, when stodgy old newspapers were increasingly emboldened to, and financially remunerated for, running headline like “Known Liar Trump Lies Again.” When applied carefully and in a limited way, this evolution of journalistic mores isn’t objectionable. (Trump really does lie a lot.) Rarely is the application actually limited or careful, though; professional journalists have little reason these days to do anything other than straightforward liberal advocacy journalism, thanks to both professional and social incentives, and providing more justification for doing so will only push newsgathering further in a particular political direction. There’s also a whole set of complications stemming from the fact that the perspective of those opposed to the View From Nowhere is indeed subject to its own biases and slant, and the admission by advocates of this fact doesn’t change the potentially malign consequences. The anti-View From Nowhere attitude is meta-discursively an ostensibly non-ideological perspective on a profoundly ideological set of ideas. The people who complain about the View From Nowhere admit that they are politically biased creatures who can’t step outside of those biases in their understanding of the world, except for when it comes to this very question of the superiority of acknowledging the impossibility of neutrality. This is what we once called ideology. But I accept that this concern is rather abstract, so let’s look at a more pragmatic example. If you take a look at this piece on Republican anti-DEI efforts from Nick Confessore in The New York Times, I think you can see some of the problems here with post-objectivity journalism. Anyone with conservative sympathies would likely see it as betraying a straightforward interest in functioning as political advocacy, despite being sold as straight news, and I certainly couldn’t blame them. The piece describes as a nefarious conspiracy that which is ultimately an ordinary expression of state politics, as ugly as the motivations are. (A fundamental and unchanging aspect of American politics is that whatever the other side is trying to do to our public education systems is nefarious, where whatever we’re trying to do is simply in the interest of education.) I kept waiting for a point in the many uncovered documents where the bad guys said, “now we’re going to pay off the state representatives to get what we want, bwahaha!” Instead, it’s just a bunch of conservative jackasses getting worked up about liberal diversity pieties and planning on defeating them through legislation and policy. Among other things, the piece gives us no sense that Confessore understands that liberals are working just as hard to keep their agenda alive in the state colleges too or why that would be less conspiratorial. And, in fact, the piece can’t reflect on those things, as its straightjacketed within the NYT guidelines on news. Confessore treats all of the described efforts as straightforwardly malign without bothering to really make the case for why. The piece does not really bother advocating for DEI, makes an remarkably limp attempt at defining what conservatives (and others) are mad about, and clearly proceeds from the assumption that the majority of its readers will recognize everything that’s being described as wicked without argument. That assumption, I would argue, is a good example of the profound audience capture that the New York Times has fallen into as it has become a global paper, reliant on subscriptions that come largely from a particular kind of person - urban, extravagantly educated, upwardly-mobile if not already affluent, the type of person who mocks meritocracy on Twitter while enjoying the fruits of their own desperate clawing up the meritocratic ladder. They are not the type who are used to entertaining the possibility that maybe their ideological opponents have a point, and increasingly the paper seems eager to give them the uncomplicated world they demand to live in. As recent Substack controversies show, the liberal demand to live unsullied by the knowledge that there are people out there who disagree with them is a growing business concern. It’s here, I guess, that I’ll wedge in my usual caveats about the Times: in its fact-gathering function it remains on par with or superior to all of its peers in American media; the people who run the paper are clearly deeply invested in arriving at the factual truth; they have maintained a commendable commitment to balance in their opinion pages despite constant and vociferous efforts within the industry to purge those pages of any conservative opinion; the production values are world-class; they appear to have survived the end of the Trump bump in media finances as well as any publication, and can continue to hand out the kind of salaries that keep some aspirational drive alive in this crumbling industry. And I like Confessore particularly, in general. Of course, were I a functional person I would likely feel pressure to say these things even if I didn’t believe them; my freelancing career appears to be over, but the paper is now so dominant in mindshare that few ambitious writers could afford to reject it. This, obviously, creates a number of problems in a media labor market rapidly running out of chairs, but that’s for another time. I think in general that the Times, like most of our remaining newsgathering apparatus, is actually really good at correctly ascertaining and faithfully relaying the facts, and much much worse at examining the underlying ideological assumptions of the people who do that ascertaining and relaying. Right-wing grievance mongers love to accuse the establishment media of lying about Republicans and their issues, but the problem is much more often a failure to interrogate how one’s particular perspective is inherently embedded in politics. For example. A fundamental problem with Confessore’s piece is that it gives remarkably little attention to the actual conservative critique of the DEI industry, a single paragraph, and immediately follows it with a blanket denial. As such: In public, some individuals and groups involved in the effort joined calls to protect diversity of thought and intellectual freedom, embracing the argument that D.E.I. efforts had made universities intolerant and narrow. They claimed to stand for meritocratic ideals and against ideologies that divided Americans. They argued that D.E.I. programs made Black and Hispanic students feel less welcome instead of more. Yet even as they or their allies publicly advocated more academic freedom, some of those involved privately expressed their hope of purging liberal ideas… They claimed, you see, they argued, and even those things they did only in public, while in private they did their dirty business…. Whatever affirmative case is to be made for questioning the diversity, equity, and inclusion business - and it is indeed business, big business, one that makes some of its priests quite wealthy - is consigned to links that Confessore knows the vast majority of readers will not bother clicking. Throughout, the piece does that “straight reporting” thing of running quotes without commentary, knowing that the readership of the piece will see them as nefarious simply by dint of being quoted in that way. For example “My big worry in these things is that we do not make ‘the good of minorities’ the standard by which we judge public policy or the effects of public policy,” wrote Scott Yenor, a conservative Idaho professor who would come to lead the anti-D.E.I. project for Claremont. “Whites will be overrepresented in some spheres. Blacks in others. Asians in others. We cannot see this as some moral failing on our part.” This is framed as some sort of ugly confession that the valiant Times is bringing into the light. Which is strange, as for the vast majority of America’s political history, this would have been seen by most people as a totally banal statement of the principle of racial equality and the limits of public policy, including most liberals. For many generations, the strategy of the civil rights movement was to emphasize that the purpose of that movement was not to privilege one race over another, but to bring everyone into a position of equality and harmony with equal protection under the law; that first sentence is not at all out of step with that old approach. I certainly wouldn’t put things this way, but I also don’t see anything particular sinister here. And the last line contains the seed of what is a natural response to certain approaches to racial politics, such as those of Ibram Kendi, who sees any racial disparity as ipso facto proof of racism: it would be very strange to expect proportional racial representation in celebration of Kwanzaa, and nobody cares that Black NFL players are overrepresented related to their proportion in the larger population, and the fact that Asian Americans probably don’t consume a lot of country music is not perceived to be a social problem…. Core to dissatisfaction with DEI is the inconsistency and unworkability of certain essential definitions of what constitutes a socially-relevant racial disparity. You could, of course, say that the context of this particular right-wing professor working with the right-wing Claremont Institute implies that his perspective is more troubling than I’m letting on, and I’d agree. But this is what bothers me so much about this approach to opinion-masquerading-as-straight-news - you have to actually say that if you’re relying on it to make your point. That is, Confessore and his editors know that the average NYT reader will interpret the quote above in the most critical way possible, which allows him to leave it there, inert, while also satisfying the intended political purpose. But this is the very worst kind of media bias, which is the bias that stems from pretending that you aren’t making a political point when you very much are. OK, this random Idaho professor said this. So what, Nick? I suspect that the “so what” is that you think it demonstrates that this effort by the Claremont Institute is evil. That’s a fine thing to say, as long as you embrace the inherent honesty of saying it! If you don’t say it, that’s when it becomes (yes) bias. When you think that merely repeating it amounts to criticism itself, that’s when you’re most embodying the stereotype of the liberal New York Times reporter. But the NYT won’t let Confessore just say it because this is a piece of reporting. Do you see the problem here? And do you see how someone like Jay Rosen can’t actually account for that problem? Second, Confessore’s piece is in such a hurry to get through the not-actually-very-interesting document dump that he fails to recognize that this is not remotely a binary issue. I spent a lot of time in my recent book pointing out that the original critics of identity politics were leftists, not conservatives, and so too with DEI. There’s long been a sensible set of criticisms from the left that argue that the world of diversity, equity, and inclusion amount to the establishment’s legalistic effort to render anti-racist movements toothless and manageable. They take organic and people-powered protest movements and run them through the machinery of the human resources department, leaving those efforts inauthentic and friendly to the institutions that run them. Worse, “workplace anti-racism initiatives may serve as an opportunity for employers to exert even more power over employees,” writes JC Pan in Jacobin. The fact that DEI efforts are run from within institutional power itself should make us skeptical of their ability to actually achieve meaningful reform, especially given that it is often the institutions themselves that need to be reformed. I’m surprised that after several years of embarrassed reconsideration of the White Fragility moment, Confessore wouldn’t think to include a nod to left criticism. Here’s a left critique of DEI from The Nation from just this past month. I wouldn’t endorse it in its entirety, but it effectively lays out a central complaint about DEI as the tip of the spear in liberal race politics: because it draws its basic logic from legalist and administrivial approaches to racial justice, DEI is an inherently individualistic methodology. It takes as its central point of interest not Black people or people of color or the racial justice movement but instead individual complainants who will, I guess, provoke justice by filling out form 34-J. (In triplicate!) It’s all about redressing specific complaints of policy and procedure, which seems entirely ill-suited for addressing social problems that are inherently multifaceted and diffuse. And DEI is, obviously, a fundamentally self-protective apparatus; colleges and corporations don’t spend so much money on them because they’re foolish enough to believe that you can achieve racial justice with PowerPoint trainings but because their existence helps them avoid legal liability and bad press. Indeed, when employees and former employees sue the institutions for racially hostile work environments, said institutions will point to the existence of DEI apparatus in the legal maneuverings, thus turning DEI into a direct impediment to the effort to redress racial inequality. The irony is juicy! There’s no notion within Confessore’s piece that left critics of DEI exist. I imagine he and the paper would cite space constraints. But even accepting that explanation, the omission is convenient for the NYT’s fundamental financial model: it leaves the piece depicting a simplistic and purely binary contrast of values, where there are on one side the valiant Associate Vice Presidents of Student Experience and on the other the wicked racism-perpetuating Republicans. That the Republican politicians are a bunch of morons who want to destroy the state university systems out of spite doesn’t make it less important to lay out the steel-manned case against DEI. It makes it even more important. The essential case against mandatory top-down diversity efforts seems neither contrarian nor controversial to me: racism is not an administrative problem and cannot be solved on the administrative level. The fact that the various attacks on DEI from the right are mounted in bad-faith can’t paper over the fundamental hollowness of the approach. We used to believe in changing people’s minds so that we can have racial harmony, but that has fallen out of fashion on the left-of-center, hard. In its place has risen a relentless racial pessimism. Under those conditions, it’s perhaps understandable why people now reflexively ask formal authority to fight their battles for them and make the world nice. All we have left is working the refs. For the record, one of the easiest ways to tell if someone’s complaint of liberal bias is worth anything is to note whether it treats liberal bias and left-wing bias as synonyms. Those things are not the same. I like thinking, and in the 21st century one of the greatest enemies of thinking is the kind of binarism suggested by Confessore’s piece, which is something like the notion “anyone who rejects the hegemony of UPenn’s HR department on matters of race is therefore necessarily a Republican state senator.” And this, finally, is the structural problem with the NYT’s current financial stability. The problem with the New York Times in 2024 is that their business model entails selling affluent urban liberals their own assumptions about the world back to them. To survive financially these days, most newsmedia is fundamentally a matter of willfully providing the opportunity for confirmation bias. Meanwhile, the stature of the NYT and its rare financial health shields them from criticism over doing so. The Times employs tons of smart people who give a shit, but there are limits to what individuals can do in light of an institutions best interests. Confessore’s piece is a good illustration of this problem; it looks like it was the result of a lot of diligent and careful reporting, and I’m not trying to attack it unfairly. I am grateful for that kind of fact finding. But it lives in the beating heart of the internal contradictions of contemporary journalistic mores. Think of your stereotype of the kind of person who (like me) subscribes to the New York Times. Whatever that person looks like, there is nothing in Confessore’s piece that could possibly challenge that person. Its description of the actual philosophical case against the diversity industrial complex is restricted only to conventional Republican complaints, eliding the most compelling criticisms, and even that case is relegated to a single desultory paragraph that is followed by, “Yet….” It provides useful documentary evidence, but aside from a few people who are intent on making proceduralist arguments against what is fundamentally a conflict of values, it mostly functions only to tell readers that they were right all along. In a shrinking and embattled industry, that sort of thing will only grow. What you’d like is for one of the most deep-pocketed publications to feel empowered not to participate - but then, the Times is deep-pocketed in part because they’ve gotten so good at serving that exact kind of customer. It’s quite the conundrum, in an industry that can’t afford to have conundrums anymore. Very tasteful web design, though. © 2024 Fredrik deBoer 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104