Curious then how things like this happened: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yF_3...

www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Without any significant pushback from within academia.

(And many of the group dynamics that led to the systematic marginalization of Blacks in American life long after the end of official segregation are the same dynamics that exclude conservatives now. Humans gonna human.)

(Pausing to note that I am not comparing conservative underrepresentation to the oppression faced by Blacks or some other marginalized group MORALLY, which would be absurd. But conservatives on campus are, well, an underrepresented minority compared to their numbers in the general population.)

And that's my basic response to most of the arguments that academics make about this stuff: change the group to any underrepresented minority you find sympathetic, and see if the argument still seems reasonable. I'm betting it does not.

Academics understand this problem very well because it's one of the big arguments for aggressive affirmative action: if you really want representation, rather than a handful of unusually tough outliers, you need a critical mass.

I think there is a real pipeline problem, which also exists in journalism. But that is not exogenous to the fact that academia skews so far to the left. People don't like working in environments where they are a loathed minority.

And academic politics became much more noticeable thanks to the internet, and I don't think that's an available option any more.

Both because the skew was less pronounced, and because the value of a college diploma kept rising, putting academics in a strong market position where they could afford to indulge in a taste for politics. But the value of a college diploma stalled in the early 2000s ...

Note, I'm not saying "should not expect" in some moral sense. I'm just making a practical argument: people will not pay you to call them lackeys and stooges. This was something that academia could get away with for a while ...

Now, you can say that that's the "lackeys and stooges" exception, but this rather proves my point: if you have defined your discipline to automatically exclude half the country, you should not expect those voters to support you financially.

I mean, multiple studies, some of them dating back before Trump, find more than a third of academics admitting they'd discriminate against conservatives, with the most recent, which surveyed academics in multiple countries and disciplines, finding that 40% said they'd never hire a Trump supporter.

It is an almost absurdly simple observation, but a great many pathologies in military policy come from the tendency to reason from values which were in the past or are merely thought to be now, connected to victory, rather than reasoning *from victory* itself as a goal.

That tariffs are bad and the administration’s immigration policy is gratuitously brutal, or that democrats will find it harder than they’d like to restore the old policy equilibrium?

I barely post here, since I don't have many followers, and almost everything I say tends to attract unpleasant screaming.

"Let me be crystal clear: I was trying to rebut the argument that 'Well, these shows aren't doing so well anyway, who can say why he was taken off air', not endorse it. Carr's actions are dangerous to democratic norms and constitutional principle, unpatriotic and utterly indefensible."

Which is, of course, exactly the argument that was made for suppressing speech that might help Trump. Sigh.

To be clear, that doesn't mean this is the left's fault--Trump's authoritarian instincts are his own. But at least some of the people going along with it are doing so out of a conviction that the stakes are now existential and we can't afford the niceties.

Which means when you *do* win politically, you tell yourself you have to make it harder for them to regain political power and suppress your speech. And so the wheel goes round and round ...

I think it also raised the stakes--if your opponents are trying to make it impossible for you to make a bunch of arguments, that makes it harder for you to win politically.