Michael Rectenwald
Dr. Michael Rectenwald is the author of twelve books, including The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda (Jan. 2023), Thought Criminal (a novel, 2020); Beyond Woke (May 2020); Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom (2019); Springtime for Snowflakes: “Social Justice” and Its Postmodern Parentage (an academic’s memoir, 2018); Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature (2016) and others.
Michael is a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College. He was a Professor of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. He also taught at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. He holds a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master's in English Literature from Case Western Reserve University, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh.
Michael has appeared on major network political talk shows (Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends First, Varney & Company, The Glenn Beck Show), on syndicated radio shows (Coast to Coast AM, Glenn Beck, The Larry Elder Show, and many others), on The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders series, and on numerous podcasts (The Tom Woods Show, The Leighton Smith Podcast, Steel-on-Steel, The Carl Jackson Podcast, and many others).
Supervisors: Jon Klancher and Kristina Straub
Address: Pittsburgh, PA
Michael is a distinguished fellow at Hillsdale College. He was a Professor of Liberal Studies and Global Liberal Studies at NYU from 2008 to 2019. He also taught at Duke University, North Carolina Central University, Carnegie Mellon University, and Case Western Reserve University. He holds a Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University, a Master's in English Literature from Case Western Reserve University, and a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Pittsburgh.
Michael has appeared on major network political talk shows (Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox & Friends, Fox & Friends First, Varney & Company, The Glenn Beck Show), on syndicated radio shows (Coast to Coast AM, Glenn Beck, The Larry Elder Show, and many others), on The Epoch Times’ American Thought Leaders series, and on numerous podcasts (The Tom Woods Show, The Leighton Smith Podcast, Steel-on-Steel, The Carl Jackson Podcast, and many others).
Supervisors: Jon Klancher and Kristina Straub
Address: Pittsburgh, PA
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Books and Textbooks by Michael Rectenwald
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1943003750
A distinguished Professor of AI-neuroscience and Theory of Mind, Cayce Varin has dissident thoughts. He differs from acceptable opinion on matters of grave importance to respectable Human Biologicals and the Federation of Pandemos, the global state. Upon confessing his divergent theories to a Graduate Student Assistant, his life is never the same. He is labeled a Thought Deviationist, among other damning designations. He is arrested by a Robot Police Agent and soon released but remains a covert Thought Deviationist living under the constant fear of future arrest, the treachery of friends, and the loss of his identity.
For Varin and a small cadre of Thought Deviationists, the ultimate threat is posed by Collective Mind—the vast centralized database and processing complex with apparent knowledge of everything, possibly even one’s innermost thoughts. Varin and fellow Thought Deviationists believe that the Federation deliberately propagates a virus to keep Human Biologicals connected to Collective Mind. Submission to the virus spells the obliteration of the self. Resistance to the virus, made possible by taking the addictive drug Eraserall, means living as a fugitive of the law and being forever hunted by Robot Police Agents to be taken in for “treatment.”
Finally, it appears that the only solution is to infiltrate Essential Data, Collective Mind’s main data and processing center. The risks are great, and the gambit may be impossible. But Varin’s future, the future of Thought Deviationists, and the future of the individual itself, depend on the mission’s success.
“Michael Rectenwald has written a thought experiment for our time, the 1984 of the COVID era, where we can step back and view today's America for what it is: a society infected not by a virus but by collective hysteria. Thought Criminal explores the meaning of individualism in an increasingly collectivist society, where our thoughts are not our thoughts but those infused in us by the media and the Collective Mind, and the very notion of free will becomes a distant memory. This is fiction that makes us think and makes us dream.” —Kenneth R. Timmerman, NY Times best-selling author of The Election Heist and other books.
"Both an allegory for our present collectivist times and a vision of the future, Thought Criminal draws you in irresistibly from the first pages, immersing you in a thrilling and disturbing adventure." —Janice Fiamengo, Professor of English (retired), University of Ottawa. Author of Sons of Feminism.
A few short years ago, Michael Rectenwald was a Marxist professor at NYU, pursuing his career and contemplating becoming a Trotskyist, when the political climate on campus – victimology, cancel-culture, no-platforming, and political correctness run-amok – began to bother him. He responded by creating a Twitter handle, @AntiPCNYUProf (now @TheAntiPCProf), and began bashing campus excesses with humor and biting satire. Predictably, he was soon discovered and pushed out of his job.
Rectenwald struck back by publishing Springtime for Snowflakes, a memoir of his experiences in academia, which included criticism and analyses of the leftism now dominating campus culture. He followed that book with Google Archipelago, which delves into the seeming enigma of why big tech embraces far-left politics – hint: self-interest is involved – and the rapid growth of consumer/citizen surveillance. The foundation for a robust leftist totalitarianism is being carefully laid.
With this new volume, Rectenwald returns with his characteristic sharp wit and incisive analysis and continues to fine tune his critique of modern leftism. In Beyond Woke, he brings his unique perspective as an ex-Marxist and civil libertarian to bear on leftist culture, with its abandonment of traditional morality and emphasis on collective social identities -- which are ironically increasingly atomized, as overwhelming centrifugal forces break up any previously stable social cohesion. The revolution is here and it’s winning. Find out why, and how to combat it.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TOC
Introduction 7
1 - I Was a Leftist NYC Prof— But When I Said the Left Was Unhinged, Colleagues Called Me a Nazi and Treated Me Like a Russian Spy 14
2 - The Destruction of the Faculty 21
3 - Congratulations! 29
4 - On the Origins and Character of Social Justice 31
5 - Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, Bias Reporting: The New Micro-techniques of Surveillance and Control 43
6 - Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism and “Social
Justice” Ideology 51
7 - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Or, How I Left Marxism 65
8 - Shaming & Shunning 74
9 - The Bias of Bias-Reducing Methods: Bias Training, Bias Reporting, and Bias Warnings Do More Harm Than Good 87
10 - A Genealogy of Social Justice Morals 91
11 - Why Political Correctness is Incorrect 104
12 - A Critique of “Social Justice” Ideology: Thinking through Marx and Nietzsche 108
13 - “Grievance Studies” Fields Encourage “Marginalized” Students & Faculty to Become Jacks of All Grievances, Masters of Nothing 125
14 - (Re)Secularizing the University 129
15 - The Gender Jackpot 137
16 - “Have You Found the Place that Makes You Want to Swallow Its Rhetoric Whole?” 141
17 - After “Social Justice:” New Paradigms for the Humanities and Social Sciences 153
18 - Totalitarianism with Communist Characteristics, Corporate Socialism, and “Woke” Capitalism 169
19 - This Is the Big Reason Corporate America Has Gone Woke (plus 4 more) 189
20 - What is the “Point de Capiton” of Leftist Ideology? 192
21 - Google Marxism: Internet Ideology & the Academics Who Perpetuate It 198
22 - The “Real Left” Versus “The Left of Capital” 217
Appendix: Best Facebook Statuses not included in Google Archipelago or Springtime for Snowflakes 219
<p>
Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom begins with familiar cultural politics as points of entry to the book’s theme regarding the reach, penetration, and soon the ubiquity of the digital world. In a book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Google Archipelago begins and ends with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digital conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be monopolies.
<p>
Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.
<p>
In contrast to academics who study digital media and bemoan such supposed horrors as “digital exploitation,” in Google Archipelago, Michael Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not “digital capitalism” as such, but leftist totalitarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms “the digitalistas”) actually serve as ideological smokescreens that obscure its real character.
<p>
Two chapters interrupt the book’s genre as non-fiction prose. Part historical science fiction and part memoir, these chapters render the story of a Soviet Gulag survivor and defector, and the author’s earlier digital self. Google Archipelago intentionally blurs the lines between argument and story, fact and artifact, the real and the imaginary.This is necessary, Rectenwald argues, because one cannot pretend to describe the Google Archipelago as if from without, as something apart from experience. In any case, soon one will no longer “go on the Internet.” The Internet and cyberspace will be everywhere, while humans and other agents will be digital artifacts within it.
<p>
The Google Archipelago represents the coextension of digitization and physical social space, the conversion of social space and its inhabitants into digital artifacts, and the potential to control populations to degrees unimagined by the likes of Stalin and Mao.
Springtime for Snowflakes: "Social Justice" and Its Postmodern Parentage is a daring and candid memoir. NYU Professor Michael Rectenwald – the notorious @AntiPCNYUProf – illuminates the obscurity of postmodern theory to track down the ideas and beliefs that spawned the contemporary “social justice” creed and movement. In fast-paced creative non-fiction, Rectenwald begins by recounting how his Twitter capers and media exposure met with the swift and punitive response of NYU administrators and fellow faculty members. The author explains his evolving political perspective and his growing consternation with social justice developments while panning the treatment he received from academic colleagues and the political left.
The memoir is the story of an education, a debriefing, as well as an entertaining and sometimes humorous romp through academia and a few corners of the author’s personal life. The memoir includes early autobiographical material to provide context for Rectenwald’s academic, political, and personal development and even surprises with an account of his apprenticeship, at age nineteen, with the poet Allen Ginsberg.
Unlike many examinations of postmodern theory, Springtime for Snowflakes is a first-person, insider narrative. Likening his testimony to that of an anthropologist who has “gone native” and returned, the author recalls his graduate education in English departments and his academic career thereafter. In his graduate studies in English and Literary and Cultural Theory/Studies, the author explains, he absorbed the tenets of Marxism, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, as well as various esoteric postmodern theories. He connects ideas gleaned there to manifestations in social justice to explain the otherwise inexplicable beliefs and rituals of this “religious” creed. Altogether, the narrative works to demystify social justice as well as Rectenwald’s revolt against it.
Proponents of contemporary social justice will find much to hate and opponents much to love in this uncompromising indictment. But social justice advocates should not dismiss this enlightening look into the background of social justice and one of its fiercest critics. This short testimonial could very well convince some to reconsider their approach. For others, Springtime for Snowflakes should clear up much confusion regarding this bewildering contemporary development.
The book provides a clear and balanced suggestion for unraveling the tangled twine of social justice ideology that runs through North American educational, corporate, media, and state institutions. Never soft-peddling its criticism, however, Springtime for Snowflakes delivers on the promise of the title by also including appendices that collect Dr. Rectenwald’s saltiest tweets and Facebook statuses.
Part I, a short Guide to Academic Writing, teaches rhetorical strategies and approaches to academic writing within and across the major divisions of the academy. For each writing strategy or essay element treated in the Guide, the authors provide examples from the reader, or from one of many resources included in each chapter’s Suggested Additional Resources. Part II, Real World Topics, also refers extensively to the Guide. Thus, the Guide shows student writers how to employ scholarly writing practices as demonstrated by the readings, while the readings invite students to engage with scholarly content.
COMMENTS
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics promises to be an ideal resource for college-level writing instruction. For students, the organization of the book will be helpful as it guides them through the process of writing and then provides real examples of writing in different disciplines. For instructors, the pairing of those examples with the writing process will simplify classroom instruction and allow for focus on particular issues relevant to the students. I am looking forward to using the book in my own writing seminars.” — Jacob Sauer, Vanderbilt University
“Rectenwald and Carl’s emphasis on discourses surrounding digital culture, transhumanism, and globalization will convince first-year writing students not only that they have something to say about these big issues, but also that their ideas matter and that there are many ways to participate in the conversation. Academic Writing, Real World Topics will model for students—as emerging scholars—the multiple approaches writers take to addressing and engaging with social, cultural, scientific, and technological change.” — Keaghan Turner, Coastal Carolina University
“With Academic Writing, Real World Topics, Rectenwald and Carl have prepared the definitive writing-across-the-curriculum textbook. This book engages students and teachers in lively and robust topics, but it also introduces them to the world of academic disciplines and their various concerns. The topics are compelling, and the concise introduction to academic writing is thorough and easily digested. This book will function not only for introductory writing sequences and WAC courses, but also for first-year seminars and other introductory surveys. There is simply no better book that I have seen for introducing students to both college-level writing and academic discourses more generally. I recommend it for instructors who wish to engage their students in productive scholarly writing and discussion, and also for those who strive for broader and deeper intellectual activity.” — Tamuira Reid, New York University
“What excites me about Academic Writing, Real World Topics is that this book is unapologetically smart, contemporary, and multi-disciplinary. It does a great job at presenting the anatomy of an argument as well as providing examples from a range of disciplines. Throughout, the book emphasizes the connection between logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The result is a systematic approach that makes students aware of how authors use language to create ideas. The emphasis on language in this text will ensure that students develop the reading and writing skills necessary to strive in college—something every text promises but rarely delivers. Finally, it is worth reiterating that the readings consist of contemporary essays in political science, sociology, education, information technology, and literary theory. This will engage students in the issues as well as prepare them as academic writers.” — Jacob Singer, Professor of Academic Writing
Comments from students using Real World Topics
“Academic Writing: Real World Topics is a book that boldly discusses the real-world problems that the new generation is now facing … The book helped me, as a student, to organize my thoughts on the emerging global culture through the lenses of renowned scholars. This collection helps students apply their growing writing skills to real topics that are applicable and important to school as well as to the rest of their lives.” — Georgia Grace Larsen, Sophomore in Media, Culture, and Communications, New York University
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics is an excellent resource for students in the twenty-first century. This book is engaging and easy-to-follow, as it is organized by thought-provoking and pertinent topics … As a student who used this book in a first-year writing seminar, I found it to be an excellent introduction to scholarly writing. Rectenwald and Carl break down various types of college-level writing into approachable steps, guide readers through each of those steps, and include a carefully-curated selection of essays that spark spirited discussions that extends well beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom.” — Hon-Lum Cheung-Cheng, Sophomore in Politics at New York University
Part I, a short Guide to Academic Writing, teaches rhetorical strategies and approaches to academic writing within and across the major divisions of the academy. For each writing strategy or essay element treated in the Guide, the authors provide examples from the reader, or from one of many resources included in each chapter’s Suggested Additional Resources. Part II, Real World Topics, also refers extensively to the Guide. Thus, the Guide shows student writers how to employ scholarly writing practices as demonstrated by the readings, while the readings invite students to engage with scholarly content.
COMMENTS
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics promises to be an ideal resource for college-level writing instruction. For students, the organization of the book will be helpful as it guides them through the process of writing and then provides real examples of writing in different disciplines. For instructors, the pairing of those examples with the writing process will simplify classroom instruction and allow for focus on particular issues relevant to the students. I am looking forward to using the book in my own writing seminars.” — Jacob Sauer, Vanderbilt University
“Rectenwald and Carl’s emphasis on discourses surrounding digital culture, transhumanism, and globalization will convince first-year writing students not only that they have something to say about these big issues, but also that their ideas matter and that there are many ways to participate in the conversation. Academic Writing, Real World Topics will model for students—as emerging scholars—the multiple approaches writers take to addressing and engaging with social, cultural, scientific, and technological change.” — Keaghan Turner, Coastal Carolina University
“With Academic Writing, Real World Topics, Rectenwald and Carl have prepared the definitive writing-across-the-curriculum textbook. This book engages students and teachers in lively and robust topics, but it also introduces them to the world of academic disciplines and their various concerns. The topics are compelling, and the concise introduction to academic writing is thorough and easily digested. This book will function not only for introductory writing sequences and WAC courses, but also for first-year seminars and other introductory surveys. There is simply no better book that I have seen for introducing students to both college-level writing and academic discourses more generally. I recommend it for instructors who wish to engage their students in productive scholarly writing and discussion, and also for those who strive for broader and deeper intellectual activity.” — Tamuira Reid, New York University
“What excites me about Academic Writing, Real World Topics is that this book is unapologetically smart, contemporary, and multi-disciplinary. It does a great job at presenting the anatomy of an argument as well as providing examples from a range of disciplines. Throughout, the book emphasizes the connection between logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The result is a systematic approach that makes students aware of how authors use language to create ideas. The emphasis on language in this text will ensure that students develop the reading and writing skills necessary to strive in college—something every text promises but rarely delivers. Finally, it is worth reiterating that the readings consist of contemporary essays in political science, sociology, education, information technology, and literary theory. This will engage students in the issues as well as prepare them as academic writers.” — Jacob Singer, Professor of Academic Writing
Comments from students using Real World Topics
“Academic Writing: Real World Topics is a book that boldly discusses the real-world problems that the new generation is now facing … The book helped me, as a student, to organize my thoughts on the emerging global culture through the lenses of renowned scholars. This collection helps students apply their growing writing skills to real topics that are applicable and important to school as well as to the rest of their lives.” — Georgia Grace Larsen, Sophomore in Media, Culture, and Communications, New York University
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics is an excellent resource for students in the twenty-first century. This book is engaging and easy-to-follow, as it is organized by thought-provoking and pertinent topics … As a student who used this book in a first-year writing seminar, I found it to be an excellent introduction to scholarly writing. Rectenwald and Carl break down various types of college-level writing into approachable steps, guide readers through each of those steps, and include a carefully-curated selection of essays that spark spirited discussions that extends well beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom.” — Hon-Lum Cheung-Cheng, Sophomore in Politics at New York University
"Bobby Gould meets Raskolnikov in Michael Rectenwald’s story collection, which pops around from New York to Florida to L.A. to Pittsburgh. No location, however, is rendered as vividly as the minds of the collection’s tormented protagonists. Guilt, remorse, self-loathing: that’s what these guys eat for breakfast. They’re a rogue’s gallery of drunks, debtors, failed husbands, failed poets, failed professors, and if they’re not under arrest they think they should be, or want to be, plead to be, or remember when they were. They lust, connive, accuse, prevaricate, contemplate murder, contemplate suicide. But they’re capable of a kind of crude poetry. One says, 'Misery loves company, but ecstasy and despair have one thing in common; they want to be left alone.' Another says, 'I was going to pick up my second wife’s stepdaughter of her third marriage. That was supposed to feel normal.' Normal in Rectenwald’s America is, at best, hair-pulling anxiety, and at worst, much worse. One thinks of the forlorn losers of Raymond Carver, stuck in the predicaments of Franz Kafka. Throughout, one laughs. With recognition. To keep from crying." -- Tim Tomlinson, fiction editor, Ducts (www.ducts.org); co-founder, New York Writers Workshop
Essays: Science, Religion, Secularism by Michael Rectenwald
In this essay, I consider several stages in the developing relationship between “useful knowledge” and literary culture. First, I discuss the rise of the useful knowledge movement in early nineteenth-century Britain. The useful knowledge movement can be traced to the gentlemanly educational and social reformers of the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century. The utilitarian coterie known as the “philosophical radicals” criticized the established educational institutions in Britain as antiquated and deficient. They developed new educational plans and systems, based largely on the economic and social conditions emerging with nascent industrialism. I argue that useful knowledge—associated with an understanding of the material world as opposed to literature, classical languages, and theology—was an educational carrier of and source for what became modern science by the end of the nineteenth century.
What, if anything, might this early nineteenth-century discourse regarding “useful knowledge” offer the contemporary moment as some try to reclaim academic institutions from their obeisance to “social justice” and its propagandistic hijacking of higher education?
As Thomas Carlyle quipped in 1829 in “Signs of the Times,” in the nineteenth century, “every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine;-- hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.” In my dissertation, “The Publics of Science: Periodicals and the Making of British Science, 1820-1860,” I have endeavored to study the “machinery” for the production and dissemination of science in culture—to examine how various sects or publics provided scientific “meal for the society.” Examining several periodicals from early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain, my dissertation is an account of emerging sites for the production, dissemination, negotiation, and appropriation of knowledge amongst various participants—authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, critics, readers and others—as they vied for (and against) cultural authority on the basis of beliefs claimed as “scientific.”
In this paper, I bring mid-nineteenth century British Secularism to bear on contemporary post-secularism and the challenge the latter poses to secularism itself. I define post-secularism as the unseating of a supposedly biased secularism from sovereignty in public spaces, and the re-emergence of religious and other non-secular variants as legitimate claimants in public and political discourse and practice. I ask whether or not a post-secular science is possible. Science, I suggest, represents the greatest case problem for the post-secular outlook.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1943003750
A distinguished Professor of AI-neuroscience and Theory of Mind, Cayce Varin has dissident thoughts. He differs from acceptable opinion on matters of grave importance to respectable Human Biologicals and the Federation of Pandemos, the global state. Upon confessing his divergent theories to a Graduate Student Assistant, his life is never the same. He is labeled a Thought Deviationist, among other damning designations. He is arrested by a Robot Police Agent and soon released but remains a covert Thought Deviationist living under the constant fear of future arrest, the treachery of friends, and the loss of his identity.
For Varin and a small cadre of Thought Deviationists, the ultimate threat is posed by Collective Mind—the vast centralized database and processing complex with apparent knowledge of everything, possibly even one’s innermost thoughts. Varin and fellow Thought Deviationists believe that the Federation deliberately propagates a virus to keep Human Biologicals connected to Collective Mind. Submission to the virus spells the obliteration of the self. Resistance to the virus, made possible by taking the addictive drug Eraserall, means living as a fugitive of the law and being forever hunted by Robot Police Agents to be taken in for “treatment.”
Finally, it appears that the only solution is to infiltrate Essential Data, Collective Mind’s main data and processing center. The risks are great, and the gambit may be impossible. But Varin’s future, the future of Thought Deviationists, and the future of the individual itself, depend on the mission’s success.
“Michael Rectenwald has written a thought experiment for our time, the 1984 of the COVID era, where we can step back and view today's America for what it is: a society infected not by a virus but by collective hysteria. Thought Criminal explores the meaning of individualism in an increasingly collectivist society, where our thoughts are not our thoughts but those infused in us by the media and the Collective Mind, and the very notion of free will becomes a distant memory. This is fiction that makes us think and makes us dream.” —Kenneth R. Timmerman, NY Times best-selling author of The Election Heist and other books.
"Both an allegory for our present collectivist times and a vision of the future, Thought Criminal draws you in irresistibly from the first pages, immersing you in a thrilling and disturbing adventure." —Janice Fiamengo, Professor of English (retired), University of Ottawa. Author of Sons of Feminism.
A few short years ago, Michael Rectenwald was a Marxist professor at NYU, pursuing his career and contemplating becoming a Trotskyist, when the political climate on campus – victimology, cancel-culture, no-platforming, and political correctness run-amok – began to bother him. He responded by creating a Twitter handle, @AntiPCNYUProf (now @TheAntiPCProf), and began bashing campus excesses with humor and biting satire. Predictably, he was soon discovered and pushed out of his job.
Rectenwald struck back by publishing Springtime for Snowflakes, a memoir of his experiences in academia, which included criticism and analyses of the leftism now dominating campus culture. He followed that book with Google Archipelago, which delves into the seeming enigma of why big tech embraces far-left politics – hint: self-interest is involved – and the rapid growth of consumer/citizen surveillance. The foundation for a robust leftist totalitarianism is being carefully laid.
With this new volume, Rectenwald returns with his characteristic sharp wit and incisive analysis and continues to fine tune his critique of modern leftism. In Beyond Woke, he brings his unique perspective as an ex-Marxist and civil libertarian to bear on leftist culture, with its abandonment of traditional morality and emphasis on collective social identities -- which are ironically increasingly atomized, as overwhelming centrifugal forces break up any previously stable social cohesion. The revolution is here and it’s winning. Find out why, and how to combat it.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
TOC
Introduction 7
1 - I Was a Leftist NYC Prof— But When I Said the Left Was Unhinged, Colleagues Called Me a Nazi and Treated Me Like a Russian Spy 14
2 - The Destruction of the Faculty 21
3 - Congratulations! 29
4 - On the Origins and Character of Social Justice 31
5 - Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, Bias Reporting: The New Micro-techniques of Surveillance and Control 43
6 - Libertarianism(s) versus Postmodernism and “Social
Justice” Ideology 51
7 - First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Or, How I Left Marxism 65
8 - Shaming & Shunning 74
9 - The Bias of Bias-Reducing Methods: Bias Training, Bias Reporting, and Bias Warnings Do More Harm Than Good 87
10 - A Genealogy of Social Justice Morals 91
11 - Why Political Correctness is Incorrect 104
12 - A Critique of “Social Justice” Ideology: Thinking through Marx and Nietzsche 108
13 - “Grievance Studies” Fields Encourage “Marginalized” Students & Faculty to Become Jacks of All Grievances, Masters of Nothing 125
14 - (Re)Secularizing the University 129
15 - The Gender Jackpot 137
16 - “Have You Found the Place that Makes You Want to Swallow Its Rhetoric Whole?” 141
17 - After “Social Justice:” New Paradigms for the Humanities and Social Sciences 153
18 - Totalitarianism with Communist Characteristics, Corporate Socialism, and “Woke” Capitalism 169
19 - This Is the Big Reason Corporate America Has Gone Woke (plus 4 more) 189
20 - What is the “Point de Capiton” of Leftist Ideology? 192
21 - Google Marxism: Internet Ideology & the Academics Who Perpetuate It 198
22 - The “Real Left” Versus “The Left of Capital” 217
Appendix: Best Facebook Statuses not included in Google Archipelago or Springtime for Snowflakes 219
<p>
Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom begins with familiar cultural politics as points of entry to the book’s theme regarding the reach, penetration, and soon the ubiquity of the digital world. In a book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Google Archipelago begins and ends with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digital conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be monopolies.
<p>
Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.
<p>
In contrast to academics who study digital media and bemoan such supposed horrors as “digital exploitation,” in Google Archipelago, Michael Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not “digital capitalism” as such, but leftist totalitarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms “the digitalistas”) actually serve as ideological smokescreens that obscure its real character.
<p>
Two chapters interrupt the book’s genre as non-fiction prose. Part historical science fiction and part memoir, these chapters render the story of a Soviet Gulag survivor and defector, and the author’s earlier digital self. Google Archipelago intentionally blurs the lines between argument and story, fact and artifact, the real and the imaginary.This is necessary, Rectenwald argues, because one cannot pretend to describe the Google Archipelago as if from without, as something apart from experience. In any case, soon one will no longer “go on the Internet.” The Internet and cyberspace will be everywhere, while humans and other agents will be digital artifacts within it.
<p>
The Google Archipelago represents the coextension of digitization and physical social space, the conversion of social space and its inhabitants into digital artifacts, and the potential to control populations to degrees unimagined by the likes of Stalin and Mao.
Springtime for Snowflakes: "Social Justice" and Its Postmodern Parentage is a daring and candid memoir. NYU Professor Michael Rectenwald – the notorious @AntiPCNYUProf – illuminates the obscurity of postmodern theory to track down the ideas and beliefs that spawned the contemporary “social justice” creed and movement. In fast-paced creative non-fiction, Rectenwald begins by recounting how his Twitter capers and media exposure met with the swift and punitive response of NYU administrators and fellow faculty members. The author explains his evolving political perspective and his growing consternation with social justice developments while panning the treatment he received from academic colleagues and the political left.
The memoir is the story of an education, a debriefing, as well as an entertaining and sometimes humorous romp through academia and a few corners of the author’s personal life. The memoir includes early autobiographical material to provide context for Rectenwald’s academic, political, and personal development and even surprises with an account of his apprenticeship, at age nineteen, with the poet Allen Ginsberg.
Unlike many examinations of postmodern theory, Springtime for Snowflakes is a first-person, insider narrative. Likening his testimony to that of an anthropologist who has “gone native” and returned, the author recalls his graduate education in English departments and his academic career thereafter. In his graduate studies in English and Literary and Cultural Theory/Studies, the author explains, he absorbed the tenets of Marxism, the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, as well as various esoteric postmodern theories. He connects ideas gleaned there to manifestations in social justice to explain the otherwise inexplicable beliefs and rituals of this “religious” creed. Altogether, the narrative works to demystify social justice as well as Rectenwald’s revolt against it.
Proponents of contemporary social justice will find much to hate and opponents much to love in this uncompromising indictment. But social justice advocates should not dismiss this enlightening look into the background of social justice and one of its fiercest critics. This short testimonial could very well convince some to reconsider their approach. For others, Springtime for Snowflakes should clear up much confusion regarding this bewildering contemporary development.
The book provides a clear and balanced suggestion for unraveling the tangled twine of social justice ideology that runs through North American educational, corporate, media, and state institutions. Never soft-peddling its criticism, however, Springtime for Snowflakes delivers on the promise of the title by also including appendices that collect Dr. Rectenwald’s saltiest tweets and Facebook statuses.
Part I, a short Guide to Academic Writing, teaches rhetorical strategies and approaches to academic writing within and across the major divisions of the academy. For each writing strategy or essay element treated in the Guide, the authors provide examples from the reader, or from one of many resources included in each chapter’s Suggested Additional Resources. Part II, Real World Topics, also refers extensively to the Guide. Thus, the Guide shows student writers how to employ scholarly writing practices as demonstrated by the readings, while the readings invite students to engage with scholarly content.
COMMENTS
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics promises to be an ideal resource for college-level writing instruction. For students, the organization of the book will be helpful as it guides them through the process of writing and then provides real examples of writing in different disciplines. For instructors, the pairing of those examples with the writing process will simplify classroom instruction and allow for focus on particular issues relevant to the students. I am looking forward to using the book in my own writing seminars.” — Jacob Sauer, Vanderbilt University
“Rectenwald and Carl’s emphasis on discourses surrounding digital culture, transhumanism, and globalization will convince first-year writing students not only that they have something to say about these big issues, but also that their ideas matter and that there are many ways to participate in the conversation. Academic Writing, Real World Topics will model for students—as emerging scholars—the multiple approaches writers take to addressing and engaging with social, cultural, scientific, and technological change.” — Keaghan Turner, Coastal Carolina University
“With Academic Writing, Real World Topics, Rectenwald and Carl have prepared the definitive writing-across-the-curriculum textbook. This book engages students and teachers in lively and robust topics, but it also introduces them to the world of academic disciplines and their various concerns. The topics are compelling, and the concise introduction to academic writing is thorough and easily digested. This book will function not only for introductory writing sequences and WAC courses, but also for first-year seminars and other introductory surveys. There is simply no better book that I have seen for introducing students to both college-level writing and academic discourses more generally. I recommend it for instructors who wish to engage their students in productive scholarly writing and discussion, and also for those who strive for broader and deeper intellectual activity.” — Tamuira Reid, New York University
“What excites me about Academic Writing, Real World Topics is that this book is unapologetically smart, contemporary, and multi-disciplinary. It does a great job at presenting the anatomy of an argument as well as providing examples from a range of disciplines. Throughout, the book emphasizes the connection between logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The result is a systematic approach that makes students aware of how authors use language to create ideas. The emphasis on language in this text will ensure that students develop the reading and writing skills necessary to strive in college—something every text promises but rarely delivers. Finally, it is worth reiterating that the readings consist of contemporary essays in political science, sociology, education, information technology, and literary theory. This will engage students in the issues as well as prepare them as academic writers.” — Jacob Singer, Professor of Academic Writing
Comments from students using Real World Topics
“Academic Writing: Real World Topics is a book that boldly discusses the real-world problems that the new generation is now facing … The book helped me, as a student, to organize my thoughts on the emerging global culture through the lenses of renowned scholars. This collection helps students apply their growing writing skills to real topics that are applicable and important to school as well as to the rest of their lives.” — Georgia Grace Larsen, Sophomore in Media, Culture, and Communications, New York University
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics is an excellent resource for students in the twenty-first century. This book is engaging and easy-to-follow, as it is organized by thought-provoking and pertinent topics … As a student who used this book in a first-year writing seminar, I found it to be an excellent introduction to scholarly writing. Rectenwald and Carl break down various types of college-level writing into approachable steps, guide readers through each of those steps, and include a carefully-curated selection of essays that spark spirited discussions that extends well beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom.” — Hon-Lum Cheung-Cheng, Sophomore in Politics at New York University
Part I, a short Guide to Academic Writing, teaches rhetorical strategies and approaches to academic writing within and across the major divisions of the academy. For each writing strategy or essay element treated in the Guide, the authors provide examples from the reader, or from one of many resources included in each chapter’s Suggested Additional Resources. Part II, Real World Topics, also refers extensively to the Guide. Thus, the Guide shows student writers how to employ scholarly writing practices as demonstrated by the readings, while the readings invite students to engage with scholarly content.
COMMENTS
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics promises to be an ideal resource for college-level writing instruction. For students, the organization of the book will be helpful as it guides them through the process of writing and then provides real examples of writing in different disciplines. For instructors, the pairing of those examples with the writing process will simplify classroom instruction and allow for focus on particular issues relevant to the students. I am looking forward to using the book in my own writing seminars.” — Jacob Sauer, Vanderbilt University
“Rectenwald and Carl’s emphasis on discourses surrounding digital culture, transhumanism, and globalization will convince first-year writing students not only that they have something to say about these big issues, but also that their ideas matter and that there are many ways to participate in the conversation. Academic Writing, Real World Topics will model for students—as emerging scholars—the multiple approaches writers take to addressing and engaging with social, cultural, scientific, and technological change.” — Keaghan Turner, Coastal Carolina University
“With Academic Writing, Real World Topics, Rectenwald and Carl have prepared the definitive writing-across-the-curriculum textbook. This book engages students and teachers in lively and robust topics, but it also introduces them to the world of academic disciplines and their various concerns. The topics are compelling, and the concise introduction to academic writing is thorough and easily digested. This book will function not only for introductory writing sequences and WAC courses, but also for first-year seminars and other introductory surveys. There is simply no better book that I have seen for introducing students to both college-level writing and academic discourses more generally. I recommend it for instructors who wish to engage their students in productive scholarly writing and discussion, and also for those who strive for broader and deeper intellectual activity.” — Tamuira Reid, New York University
“What excites me about Academic Writing, Real World Topics is that this book is unapologetically smart, contemporary, and multi-disciplinary. It does a great job at presenting the anatomy of an argument as well as providing examples from a range of disciplines. Throughout, the book emphasizes the connection between logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The result is a systematic approach that makes students aware of how authors use language to create ideas. The emphasis on language in this text will ensure that students develop the reading and writing skills necessary to strive in college—something every text promises but rarely delivers. Finally, it is worth reiterating that the readings consist of contemporary essays in political science, sociology, education, information technology, and literary theory. This will engage students in the issues as well as prepare them as academic writers.” — Jacob Singer, Professor of Academic Writing
Comments from students using Real World Topics
“Academic Writing: Real World Topics is a book that boldly discusses the real-world problems that the new generation is now facing … The book helped me, as a student, to organize my thoughts on the emerging global culture through the lenses of renowned scholars. This collection helps students apply their growing writing skills to real topics that are applicable and important to school as well as to the rest of their lives.” — Georgia Grace Larsen, Sophomore in Media, Culture, and Communications, New York University
“Academic Writing, Real World Topics is an excellent resource for students in the twenty-first century. This book is engaging and easy-to-follow, as it is organized by thought-provoking and pertinent topics … As a student who used this book in a first-year writing seminar, I found it to be an excellent introduction to scholarly writing. Rectenwald and Carl break down various types of college-level writing into approachable steps, guide readers through each of those steps, and include a carefully-curated selection of essays that spark spirited discussions that extends well beyond the traditional boundaries of the classroom.” — Hon-Lum Cheung-Cheng, Sophomore in Politics at New York University
"Bobby Gould meets Raskolnikov in Michael Rectenwald’s story collection, which pops around from New York to Florida to L.A. to Pittsburgh. No location, however, is rendered as vividly as the minds of the collection’s tormented protagonists. Guilt, remorse, self-loathing: that’s what these guys eat for breakfast. They’re a rogue’s gallery of drunks, debtors, failed husbands, failed poets, failed professors, and if they’re not under arrest they think they should be, or want to be, plead to be, or remember when they were. They lust, connive, accuse, prevaricate, contemplate murder, contemplate suicide. But they’re capable of a kind of crude poetry. One says, 'Misery loves company, but ecstasy and despair have one thing in common; they want to be left alone.' Another says, 'I was going to pick up my second wife’s stepdaughter of her third marriage. That was supposed to feel normal.' Normal in Rectenwald’s America is, at best, hair-pulling anxiety, and at worst, much worse. One thinks of the forlorn losers of Raymond Carver, stuck in the predicaments of Franz Kafka. Throughout, one laughs. With recognition. To keep from crying." -- Tim Tomlinson, fiction editor, Ducts (www.ducts.org); co-founder, New York Writers Workshop
In this essay, I consider several stages in the developing relationship between “useful knowledge” and literary culture. First, I discuss the rise of the useful knowledge movement in early nineteenth-century Britain. The useful knowledge movement can be traced to the gentlemanly educational and social reformers of the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century. The utilitarian coterie known as the “philosophical radicals” criticized the established educational institutions in Britain as antiquated and deficient. They developed new educational plans and systems, based largely on the economic and social conditions emerging with nascent industrialism. I argue that useful knowledge—associated with an understanding of the material world as opposed to literature, classical languages, and theology—was an educational carrier of and source for what became modern science by the end of the nineteenth century.
What, if anything, might this early nineteenth-century discourse regarding “useful knowledge” offer the contemporary moment as some try to reclaim academic institutions from their obeisance to “social justice” and its propagandistic hijacking of higher education?
As Thomas Carlyle quipped in 1829 in “Signs of the Times,” in the nineteenth century, “every little sect among us, Unitarians, Utilitarians, Anabaptists, Phrenologists, must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine;-- hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.” In my dissertation, “The Publics of Science: Periodicals and the Making of British Science, 1820-1860,” I have endeavored to study the “machinery” for the production and dissemination of science in culture—to examine how various sects or publics provided scientific “meal for the society.” Examining several periodicals from early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain, my dissertation is an account of emerging sites for the production, dissemination, negotiation, and appropriation of knowledge amongst various participants—authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, critics, readers and others—as they vied for (and against) cultural authority on the basis of beliefs claimed as “scientific.”
In this paper, I bring mid-nineteenth century British Secularism to bear on contemporary post-secularism and the challenge the latter poses to secularism itself. I define post-secularism as the unseating of a supposedly biased secularism from sovereignty in public spaces, and the re-emergence of religious and other non-secular variants as legitimate claimants in public and political discourse and practice. I ask whether or not a post-secular science is possible. Science, I suggest, represents the greatest case problem for the post-secular outlook.
In order to account for a shift from catastrophism to gradualism, I argue that science and literature must be referred to underlying discursive pressures mediating between cultural spheres. Rather than considering literature as appropriating the idioms of science, and/or vice versa, the social and political significations of competing epistemologies and philosophical positions within and across cultural spheres should be traced to account for changes within cultural representation.
I wrote the following essay (“From ‘Material and Philosophick Necessity’ to ‘Intellectual Physicks’”) several years ago, as an inaugural entry into a new approach to outmode both “interdisciplinary” and “multi-disciplinary” studies. I called the approach "Historical Inter-Field Studies." While “inter-field studies” already existed, it involves Paul DiMaggio’s and Walter Powell’s notion of the field in terms of organizational relations within institutions. It seems to be a method or way to understand institutional dynamics.
I use “field” differently—in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of the term—to refer to a particular kind of social terrain, a bounded space of struggle sometimes but not necessarily—and here I am qualifying Bourdieu characterized by power differentials, always structured by rules of access differentially distributed among players, and constrained by a set of legitimate positions on questions—that is, some positions are beyond the boundaries of legitimate discourse.
Historical Inter-Field Studies was needed, I believed in particular to preclude a major pitfall of “interdisciplinarity”—namely, the anachronistic framing of the objects of study according to “disciplines,” when the domains of knowledge have not only been divided differently but also in the periods that I study they did not conform to disciplines and were not referred to as disciplines. Disciplines did not exist as such.
According to David Acevedo of the National Association of Scholars, hundreds of North American academics have been subjected to cancel culture to date, including yours truly. And the number continues to grow. This is to say nothing about the curriculum, which has suffered excisions of canonical works from literature and philosophy and the denunciation of correct answers in math, among many other abominations.
Now woke ideology has led to the resignation of the most famous academic alive: the psychologist, best-selling author, and public intellectual Jordan Peterson, who announced in the National Post his decision to retire from his position as tenured full professor at the University of Toronto.
In this talk, I review critiques of social justice then point to several emergent paradigms gaining attention outside of the academy. Such alternative frameworks include neomodernism, integralism, and neoreaction, among others. I argue that these and other paradigms should be considered, at least, for what they can tell us about the assumptions and values underwriting teaching and research in the social justice university.
(Incidentally, as news of this talk circulated around the English Department at Case Western Reserve University, what amounted to a boycott was effected, which most of the members of the department observed. Aside from the chair, who had to be there, and my former mentor, who had gotten me invited, one other faculty member attended. A gaggle of graduate students did come. The remainder of the audience included some of my own friends and fans, a law professor sympathetic to my ideas, and his friend.
Some of the hullabaloo surrounding my talk had to do with my mention of "Neo-reaction" as a means to put pressure on the dominant paradigm of social justice. I explain in the talk that I draw only one idea from "Mencius Moldbug" and that I had absolutely no interest in his political orientation, nor did I take it seriously. The other factor was of course my reputation as a firebrand and someone whose ideas have been deemed verboten a priori.
I consider the academy, at least in the humanities and most of the social sciences, as rotten and corrupted by academic leftism, now called "social justice." No hearing is even allowed of ideas, or representation of perspectives permitted that contradict the dominant paradigm, or call it into question. The university is a religious organization where the humanities and most of the social sciences are concerned.)
This piece represents part of the Preface and a later chapter on (trans)gender theory.
A memoir of my graduate education in Critical Theory and Postmodern Theory, the book traces the contemporary "social justice" ideology to postmodern theoretical roots, while finding its disciplinary mechanisms in Stalinism and Maoism.
One of the many difficulties that attends a mass attack by hordes of cyber-critics is getting around to answering them. I would never try respond to every critic, for, as the late O.W. Crane often admonished me: "If you stop for every barking dog, your path will never end." Yet I have wanted to address at least the most egregious cases and also to answer one or two of the predominate types.
I can tell you a little about shaming and shunning -- what types of people initiate it, the way it builds, and how it is maintained. I can also speak to the the kinds of responses the shamed and shunned are liable to take in response.
To date, I have yet to examine the philosophical premises of the social justice creed, or formally to offer a theoretical framework or set of frameworks for critiquing and refuting it. This essay represents a first effort at doing both...First, I will briefly trace a Soviet and a few postmodernist contributions to social justice ideology. Then, I will turn my attention to two major thinkers: Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche – in order to find ways that the two thinkers may be adduced to provide resources for understanding and critically assessing the social justice ideology.
Presented at the 2017 Left Forum at C.U.N.Y. John Jay College, NYC June 3rd 2017. Featuring Michael Rectenwald - NYU Professor, Vox - Investigative Journalist, Helen Buyniski - Journalist.
Note: I am responsible for and stand behind my own presentation only. I have many problems with several of the points made by the two speakers who follow me and I do not endorse all of the points that they make. I was not the panel organizer and had no access to the texts of the other presentations.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/resecularizing-the-university/
My reply to the Orwellian Liberal Studies "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Working Group."
In my new book, Google Archipelago, I recall the gulag archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s literary masterpiece, while referring to a singular system of interconnected digital producers or “islands.” In suggesting a comparison between Google and the Gulag, each with its own set of archipelagos, I don’t mean to suggest that Google, an emblem for the digital giants of Big Data, and the Gulag, a massive prison system of the Soviet Union, can be understood as equally punitive or horrific. One was a vast network of arbitrary, brutal, elaborate, and tortuous penal camps “and special settlements…turned into an organized system of terror and exploitation of forced labor.”[2] The other is a vast constellation of digital giants with enormous economic and governmental power, but no physical torture, incarceration, forced labor, or immediate prospects of facing a firing squad.
Yet, I certainly do mean to draw an analogy. As the Gulag Archipelago had once represented the most developed set of technological apparatuses for disciplinary and governmental power and control in the world, so the Google Archipelago represents the contemporary equivalent of these capacities, only considerably less corporeal in character to date, yet immeasurably magnified, diversified, and extended in scope.
The principals of what I call Big Digital—the purveyors of mega-data services, media, cable, and internet services, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents, apps, and the developing Internet of Things (or Things of the Internet, as I describe the relation in what follows) are not only monopolies or would-be monopolies but also will either continue to be incorporated by the state, or become elements of a new corporate state power.
Even if only augmentations of existing state power, the apparatuses of Big Digital combine to produce the Google Archipelago, which stands to effect such an enormous sea change in governmental and economic power—inclusive of greatly enhanced and extended capabilities for supervision, surveillance, recording, tracking, facial-recognition, robot-swarming, monitoring, corralling, social-scoring, trammeling, punishing, ostracizing, un-personing or otherwise controlling populations to such an extent—that the non-corporal-punishment aspect of the Google Archipelago will come to be recognized as much less significant than its total political impact.
This chapter derisively refers to the notorious Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) as the Great Leap Backward. But China's Great Leap Forward is not the ultimate object of my scorn. That scorn is reserved for the contemporary project conducted by people, who, if they knew anything about history, or cared about its results, would never propose this treacherous and potentially world-devastating campaign called the Great Reset--unless their intentions are evil and not merely misguided.
Business Insider columnist Josh Barro suggested that woke capitalism provides a form of parapolitical representation for workers and corporate consumers. Given their perceived political disenfranchisement, woke capitalism offers them representation in the public sphere, as they see their values reflected in corporate pronouncements.
Others have suggested that corporations have gone woke only to be spared cancellation by Twitter mobs and other activists, that wokeness is a good “branding tool, ” or that progressive shareholders also demand corporate activism.
But woke capitalism cannot be sufficiently explained in terms of placating coastal leftists, ingratiating left-liberal legislators, or avoiding the wrath of activists. Rather, as wokeness has escalated and taken hold of corporations and states, it has become a demarcation device, a shibboleth for cartel members to identify and distinguish themselves from their nonwoke competitors, who are to be starved of capital investments. Woke capitalism has become a monopoly game.
According to the New York Times[1] and the Anti-Defamation League,[2] the Great Reset has no basis in fact. Or, as the BBC claims,[3] the Great Reset is a benign effort on the part of "leading thinkers"[4] to bring about "a fairer, greener future,"[5] based on a reset of capitalism. Meanwhile, Time devoted an issue to the Great Reset, effectively hailing it as the solution to all our problems post-covid.[6] Klaus Schwab, the Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), suggests that the Great Reset is merely an attempt to address the weaknesses of capitalism exposed by the covid crisis, as well as the looming catastrophes posed by unmitigated climate change and environmental degradation. This is what Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret suggest in their book, Covid-19: The Great Reset. It's what numerous documents on the WEF website claim. Why, then, has the Great Reset been construed as a vast leftwing conspiracy to create a totalitarian one-world government?
I don't mean to suggest that the truth lies somewhere between denial and conspiracy. Rather, I want to make clear just what the Great Reset entails, according to its architects and subscribers. I rely on the claims of Klaus Schwab and his WEF contributors, the WEF's partnerships, developments in the U.S. and around the world, and on the implications that can be reasonably drawn from proposals and their implementation. In the process, I also mean to show how the Great Reset idea generates "conspiracy theories," as if spontaneously.
Few thinkers, even among Marxists, seem willing to tell the working class this fundamental fact, and it surely is not going to be acknowledged by major political office holders or campaigners, whose careers depend upon the belief that their particular nostrums or plans will remedy the crisis. Yet neither Trump with his protectionism nor Sanders with his so-called socialism can restore the economy (in the U.S. or beyond) to post-war levels of growth, the kind of growth upon which their promises depend. Likewise, their policies and plans would not ameliorate the conditions of the vast majority. As long as the economic system is capitalism, profit will be the driving factor, and the predicament of capitalism has precisely to do with a loss of confidence in the profitability of investment. (See link, above.)
https://www.academia.edu/29198910/Brexit_Trumpism_Sanders_and_the_Decrepit_State_of_Capitalism_Against_Political_Determinism
I have been asked what I think about the protests and marches against the inauguration of Donald Trump, as well as what to say in response to liberals, leftists, women, feminists, trans* persons and others participating in them. This essay represents an answer to the question. Let me explain: those asking are generally unsure of their position and balance in today's political landscape. While the ascension of Trump strikes many as quite ominous, those asking this are also very uncomfortable about the Trump opposition. That opposition seems coincidentally aligned with particular ruling interests and agencies, including the intelligence community, the political elite and their billionaire donors, and the corporatocracy – that is, many of the essential structural components of US worldwide dominance and domestic rule. The fact is – despite the honest motives and real political objectives of participants – the contemporary left-liberal movement, inclusive of the Women's March on Washington, is being promoted and supported, financially and otherwise, by particular sectors of the ruling class – in particular the financial sectors inclusive of Wall Street and the banks, the dominant political sector, and the intelligence sector. These sectors are currently struggling to regain hegemony after a recent loss to the sectors that support Trump, which include the military and industrial bases. The prior sectors control most of the mainstream media and sponsored the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Most of the mainstream media are promulgating dissent and agitation against the recent realignments. And the mainstream media operate under the authority and direction of the same corporate and political masters who backed Clinton.
Now, the field is also being wielded to discredit “climate change deniers.”1 By pathologizing the thinking processes of these stubbornly mistaken subjects, the views of said subjects can be safely dismissed. After all, the theory of anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is obviously true, or so says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the planetary authority on the matter. Likewise, those who doubt or deny ACC must be crazy. The point of psychological studies is to discover just what is wrong with these people and how, if possible, to change their minds.
The received notion of the academy’s irrelevance is a guise that has allowed the institution to hide its ideological role in plain sight. Yet the cathedral does generate dominant ideologies, although time is required for its products to be disseminated across the broader social body after they have been digested and excreted by the media, the interchange between the cathedral and the unwashed. However, the time lapse has decreased in the digital age, when academics can speak directly to the public on social media, and when their publications are accessible to the layperson in digital formats—although in jargon laden and often incoherent prose.
Nevertheless, if the primary means of ideological production is the academy, and if academics are the primary owners of the means of ideological production, then the pronouncements that come from academics are significant.
It may take time for academia’s ideological work to affect the social body, but the effect is sure to be felt. That’s why a recent article, published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, should be a cause for concern.
----
A peculiar phrase recently introduced into the political lexicon by media cognoscenti describes a new corporate philosophy: “woke capitalism.”[1] Coined by Ross Douthat of the New York Times, woke capitalism refers to a burgeoning wave of companies that apparently have become advocates of social justice. Some major corporations now intervene in social and political issues and controversies, partaking in a new corporate activism. The newly “woke” corporations support activist groups and social movements, while adding their voices to political debates. Woke capitalism has endorsed Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo Movement, contemporary feminism, LGBTQ rights, and immigration activism, among other leftist causes.
Might that be because you are a not a scholar but rather a sloppy slinger of plug-n-play "social justice" argot and meme-laden tripe? Just for example, you have my name listed beside "Citizens for Legitimate Government" (which is now CLG News). I sold the website over fifteen years ago, and maybe once a year, or once every two years, contribute an article to the site. Otherwise, I have nothing to do with it. The assignation of the site to me is the equivalent of calling a freelance contributor to the Nation its owner--oh, I mean "governor."
Also, I am a civil libertarian, so according to your exclusions, I do not belong on your list. But then again, your list is nothing but a meaningless collection of bogies haunting a febrile, McCarthyist left, a neocon left, a cocksure but ideologically-deranged left, whose delirious self-righteousness makes you and your hordes of bots far more dangerous than any neo-reactionary grouping of approximately five guys in their basements, a group that hasn't killed anyone, let alone the 94 million murdered by the epigones of Marx.
Yours is a left that proudly dons its professorial gowns and decorates them with virtue-signaling buttons, like it's great to kill 9-month-old babies postpartum, even when the "gender they were assigned at birth" was "girl." What wonderful people. God forbid those pro-lifers, who object to mass-murdering female babies in the name of anti-patriarchy.
All together, I see nothing in your list but a conflation of disparate categories, histrionics, and amazingly, a firm and zealous belief in your own innocence, an unabashed certainty that leftism is the default no-fault ideology, that your moral probity is indubitable, and that you are a superior moral human being to those on your scrwal of shame. Meanwhile, you screech like a dervish hellbent on vengeance, or a Red Guard zealot in the Maoist Cultural Revolution; you sound like someone who would have relished the opportunity to conduct struggle sessions and put the ideologically impure on trial, and worse.
I have news for you. Four times more people were killed in the name of "equality" than in the name of "supremacy." Leftists in power are the most murderous political contingent in world history. The score is 94 to 25 million, and the left is "winning." (Oh, I forgot that murder for a noble abstraction is fine, utterly exempt, and not even murder!)
Get off your moral high horse, because it's nothing but a painted merry-go-round pony. And yes, it's phony, just like the simulacrum that your news media produces for you daily.
But no, it's the "alt-right," and "them Russians them Russians" (Allen Ginsberg, "America," 1956; he'd have despised your sickeningly censorious "social justice" authoritarian lunacy). And it's that alt-right--where "alt-right" means anyone right of Stalin (you don't even get the irony I bet), everyone who's "incorrect" because they're wrong, wrong because they are not unhinged, a requirement for being declared sane in leftist land, where Cartesian self-affirmation amounts to "I don't have to think, therefore I'm correct."
Enjoy your list-keeping. But if you libel me again, I will sue for all the pacifiers in your safe space.
I address four questions here: Since ideology critique holds that no one is free of ideology, why isn't leftist ideology (LI) subjected to critique? Why are only right and other non-LI critiqued, and why are they generally described in terms of disorder, disruption, and epidemic? How does LI elude study/criticism? The organizing core or "point de caption" of LI explains all. So what is the essential core of LI? The answer lies within--within the essay, not your soul--unless you're a leftist. But it LIES there in both senses of the word.
Introducing the @antipcnyuprof
On September 12, 2016, I established a Twitter account with the name “Deplorable NYU Prof” and the official handle @antipcnyuprof. This Twitter identity – replete with Friedrich Nietzsche avatar – represented a satirical character wielded by a self-proclaimed but anonymous NYU professor apparently gone rogue. As with all satire, the mockery was over-the-top, but the intended effect was serious criticism. The Twitter account allowed me to air views that I felt reluctant to issue under my real name, and to render them without undue circumspection.
Criticism of political correctness was supposed to be the exclusive province of the rightwing. For most observers, it was almost inconceivable that an anti-P.C. critic could come from another political quarter. Unsurprisingly, then, the majority of people who discovered my case, including some reporters, simply assumed that I was a conservative. As one Twitter troll put it: “You’re anti-P.C.? You must be a rightwing nut-job.” But as I explained in numerous interviews and essays, I was not a Trump supporter; I was never a right-winger, or an alt-right-winger; I was never a conservative of any variety. Hell, I wasn’t even a classical John Stuart Mill liberal.
In fact, for several years, I had identified as a left communist. My politics were to the left (and considerably critical of the authoritarianism) of Bolshevism!
ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN?
HAD MY DAD understood it, my graduate school enrollment in "Literary and Cultural Theory" would have struck hin1 as tantamount o madness, like self-commitment to an insane asylum. After the Ginsberg apprenticeship, which definitively ended any remaining prospects I had for medical school, he wouldn't have had tears left to cry. Perhaps that partly explains why I got married, had three children, and worked in advertising for nine years first, waiting until my early thirties to begin grad school. By then, my father had been considerably reduced, physically and cognitively, by a series of strokes. I no longer had to answer
to him, even if I wanted to.
Obviously, I had by now known and accepted the premise that English Studies was a battlefield of “textual politics,” and that the players made no bones about their agendas. Previously, critics in the field, like the old New Critics with their plodding close reading of texts, had pretended to be neutral, but their neutrality was merely a thin scrim for cultural domination. Dead white men had ruled the English canon long enough. But this was only the most flagrant of offenses. Other suspects were singled out for prosecution – including an exclusive focus on the text itself (New Criticism), assuming the centrality or superiority of European culture (Eurocentrism), implicitly endorsing heterosexuality as a norm (heteronormativity), believing that humanity is exceptional and that individual humans have unitary selves (humanism), believing in an essence of human nature and/or in the essence of essential types of humans such as racial groups and women and men (essentialism), the belief that neutral knowledge is discoverable by scientific means (positivism), the belief that words might faithfully represent an external reality (logocentrism), and the privileging of the masculine in the construction of meaning (phallogocentrism) – among others. Every one of these notions or beliefs has been treated as a villain, a laughing stock, or both.
A revision might include a treatment of my early high school years as a Catholic seminarian living nearly year-round in a Capuchin monastery. Certainly, the connection between this rigorous scholarly environment and intensive religious indoctrination should be understood as a prelude to my eventual scholarship in Secularism.
Please see the final page for a bibliography of my web essays that are listed nowhere else on the web as such. You'll see why if you read them.
Comments very welcome. Not sure what I'm doing this for, but it may be germinal for a longer academic and scholarly memoir. Thank you.
other accessible information environments, such as intranets or other databases.
ClassificationBox program determines the best classification method and its parameters for classifying a particular data set. ClassificationBox is a stand-alone java application for text classification. The program was developed in order to determine which classification methods and parameters are optimal for a given data set.
Morse Command is also an editing tool for Morse scenarios. This function of Morse Command is not discussed here. We discuss the Morse Scenario Editor in another document. The purpose of this document is to allow users to install and set up Morse Command and Morse Station, in order to run experiments on Morse Stations.
https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/media
Essays at:
https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/essays
Aug. 07, 2018 - 4:14 - Anti-PC professor Michael Rectenwald on the potential legal changes facing a University of Minnesota proposal to force preferred pronoun usage on campus. Plus, a sneak peek at his new book, 'Springtime for Snowflakes.' #Tucker
Michael Rectenwald interviewed by Dan Verner of the Liberalist
Interview of Michael Rectenwald by Stephan Molyneux
Michael Rectenwald interviewed by Milo Yiannopoulos
Michael Rectenwald interviewed by Dan Verner of the Liberalist
Michael Rectenwald on Tucker Carlson Tonight
Interview on Frontpage Magazine
Michael Rectenwald interviewed on Fox & Friends
Michael Rectenwald interviewed for the Daily Caller
Interview on Antifa for Lifezette/Polizette
Introductions; rundown on respective academic and other relevant backgrounds; retelling "social justice" run-ins.
Peterson and Rectenwald on psychological & historical analyses of "social justice" ideology, respectively; the "social justice" techniques & indoctrination methods; the epistemological solipsism, identity obsession & ultimately authoritarian character of the SJ movement.
Kirbow discusses alternative approaches for true justice & compassion in various settings, including minority communities.
Introduction of the ExchangeSpaces project inaugurated by Michael Rectenwald & John Kirbow; discussion of plans for countering "social justice" ideology & ideologues with new platforms for effective dialogue; support networks for those (professors, students & others) embroiled in "social justice" melees; building an alliance and website linking to the works of professorial "Avengers of the Academy" (a central clearing house for linking to sympathetic professors’ websites, YouTube channels, & blogs, etc.); publishing narratives by those presently or formerly under “social justice” attack; replication of ExchangeSpace model across multiple universities; information sharing & network of support.
Is the University Fundamentally Religious? A conversation with Rachel Fulton Brown
Conversation with Rachel Fulton Brown, Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. Topics covered: the university, academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, the religious and the secular, Milo Yiannopolous, and more.
Is political correctness harming the nation? Mar. 28, 2017 - 5:12 - 'The O'Reilly Factor' assesses the impact of culture wars
Discussion of social justice activism, intersectionality theory, academic freedom and more
Essay referred to:
http://www.theamericanconservative.co...
Michael's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/michael.rect...
Michael's Twitter Accounts:
@antipcnyuprof and @drrectenwald
Campus protests have recently reached a new level of intensity, with riots even breaking out in Berkeley, California earlier this month. Dr. Michael Rectenwald, a clinical professor of liberal studies at New York University, joins the podcast to share his insights on what he sees from the most extreme groups on campus.
Professor Rectenwald gained notoriety when he announced he was the author of a previously anonymous Twitter page called “Deplorable NYU Prof.” Dr. Rectenwald controversially was placed on paid leave at NYU after his revelation. Were his Twitter page and his paid leave related? Professor Rectenwald tells us, and also explains how “social justice warriors” have taken over most campuses.
Listen now to this thought-provoking interview.
Subscribe to The Contributing Factor podcast on iTunes
Published on Feb 7, 2017
One NYU Professor told One America’s Claire Hardwick that students who identify as ‘Social Justice Warriors’ are relying on fear and censorship to promote their agenda.
Category
News & Politics
License
Standard YouTube License
In this week of the Politics Society’s Podcast, Adrian Chochorek interviews Professor Michael Rectenwald, the anti-PC NYU Professor. During the episode, you will hear why Rectenwald is against politically correct language, his take on current events at NYU, and what inspired him to create his well-known twitter account.
https://www.michaelrectenwald.com/media
Having lived among the true believers for his entire career, Rectenwald’s description and analysis of the snowflake phenomenon are pitch-perfect.
...
With training like this, Rectenwald is as fluent as one can be in the language of the academic Left. The phrasings of postcolonialism, feminism, and transhumanism flow from his pen like rainwater from a gutterspout in a summer storm. Rectenwald was in the thick of the postmodernist hive for decades, wingtip-to- wingtip with the queen bees of the transgressive academy.
Rectenwald's seven-page Preface alone is worth the price of the book, since it sums up the whole issue from postmodern start to the social justice finish, with alarming examples of: "privilege," "white privilege," "privilege-checking," "self-criticism," "auto-critique," "cultural appropriation,""intersectionality" "discursive violence," "rape culture," "micro-aggressions," and "many others. The terms proliferate almost as rapidly as gender identities." If some of the above puzzles you, ask a student!...
I really like books with short chapters! You will really like this book too. So will any student you give it to: it will sen,-e as a coat of armor.
Michael Rectenwald has written what should become a go-to book for scholar interested in the historical development of the term ‘secularism.’ He does so both by mapping the networks through which competing varieties of secularism circulated in Victorian middle-class society, and by using close readings of individual writers to clarify conceptual distinctions. Thomas Carlyle’s this-worldly re-enchantment in Sartor Resartus is contrasted to Richard Carlile’s ‘proto-positivist’ rejection of religion in the name of science; the writings of the three Newman brothers are explored as a catalogue of worldview options within the emerging condition of ‘secularity’; and George Eliot’s eventual conciliatory approach to religion exemplifies what one might call an early ‘post-secularism.’
Rechtenwald read and embraced all the deconstructionist postmodern bogeymen who outsiders have often only heard about around the campfire, people like Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault, as well as many whose names they have never encountered. He learned how to “ironize” the social order of “late capitalism.” He became part of the intellectual avant-garde...
Later, he was baptized in the waters of feminism and gender studies. “I found the idea of the social construction of gender gratifying and I must admit that I enjoyed gender constructionism, partly for its shock value. . . . I had been firmly convinced of the social and linguistic construction of gender. I wasn’t merely play-acting” (p. 71). But this insider was an outsider, because—as a white heterosexual male—he wasn’t an Other and knew that he was trespassing where he could easily land in rhetorical, social, and professional hot water.
Next he learned, from Gyorgy Lukas’s History and Class Consciousness, that each person has his or her own truth. He learned that, in the social justice worldview, “knowledge is personal, individual, and impenetrable to others . . . [E]veryone is locked in an impenetrable identity chrysalis with access to a personal knowledge that no one else can reach” (p. 74)... This epistemological solipsism gives rise, Rechtenwald explains, to a “morality-through-being” or “identity ethics” that results in a “moral ranking in which the lowest on the totem pole is deemed a moral superior by virtue of her (previous) subordination” (p. 75). Therefore, he concludes “social justice ideology does not foster egalitarianism. Rank is maintained, only the bottom becomes the top when the totem pole of identity is inevitably flipped upside-down and stood on its head” (p. 75). As people strive to compete in the “Oppression Olympics,” the “race to the bottom is really a race to the top” (p. 75). If you want to know the social justice movement’s influences and mindset, read these chapters for yourself.
Ultimately, Rechtenwald moved into the field of Science Studies, analyzing science through the prism of his graduate education. After a messy stop at a historically black college, he became a rising star and found a position at a top university—NYU.
Understand that this book is first and foremost a memoir, not a political or philosophical treatise. It’s about Professor Rectenwald’s personal journey to where he is today in the realm of ideas and politics. Like any good story, it’s a book filled with crises that demand resolutions.
Rectenwald first came to fame when he was outed by NYU's school newspaper as the previously anonymous @antipcNYUProf. His new book, Springtime for Snowflakes: 'Social Justice' and its Postmodern Parentage chronicles the slowly increasing temperature of the water—the ideological climate of elite universities—which nearly killed his academic career.
Taking the metaphor up a level, academia itself can be seen as the frog, and the style of thought that predominates within the institution as the water. Reading Rectenwald's memoir about the gradual growth of social justice thinking within academia is like watching helplessly as education as we know it is slowly boiled alive...
From the beginning, Rectenwald broadly identifies the anti-intellectual neo-Fascist totalitarians and the academic Quislings who, held in a sort of dhimmitude, comply with them. He reminds us of the ground lost by quoting from the 1915 “Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom” from the American Association of University Professors: “Genuine boldness and thoroughness of inquiry, and freedom of speech, are scarcely reconcilable with the prescribed inculcation of a particular opinion upon a controverted question.” Then, he allows that, having experienced an “extended immersion” in the postmodern perspective, he is now “an outsider looking back in.”
Review by: David G. Reagles
This morning, NYU professor Michael Rectenwald woke up to discover he had been ‘disappeared’ from a website that had once featured at least three of his articles. The articles remained, but his name was no longer connected to them. The byline name, which had been his, now belonged to someone else.
Rina Arya is the sole author. I simply can't find a way to remove my from thel list of authors. The essay includes a review of my Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age.
Diving into “Nineteenth-Century British Secularism: Science, Religion and Literature”
Buzzkillers, once again we were fortunate enough in this episode to speak to a genuine scholar and expert on British secularism in the 19th century, Professor Michael Rectenwald from New York University. We went to interview him, so download and listen in for his fascinating interview.
Essentially, there’s been a myth about secularism for as long as it has been a philosophy. The myth is that it is the opposite of religion and that it seeks the eradication of religion. Historically, this is not true. Secularism was developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a movement to supersede atheism, not eliminate religion or religious practices. It was a movement of pluralists who wanted in include religious believers and non-believers, theists and non-theists in a modern society
Secularism and secularization movements sought to create a pluralist society of co-existence of the religious and the non-religious. As such, secularism and the process of secularization are important elements in the modernization of British and European societies.
In less than 12 months, he will have published three books, including his most recent, “Global Secularisms in a Post-Secular Age: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age,” that he co-edited with distinguished Victorianist scholar George Levine.
The Publics of Science: Periodicals and the Making of British Science, 1820-1860
Director: Jon Klancher
Abstract
This dissertation examines what I call the “publics of science,” from early to mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It is an account of new and emerging sites for the production, dissemination, and appropriation of knowledge amongst various participants—authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, critics, readers, and others—as they vied for (and against) cultural authority on the basis of beliefs claimed as “scientific.” Drawing on theoretical frameworks from the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), actor-network theory, periodical studies, the history of the book—and operating under the broad tent of cultural studies—I introduce to the cultural history of science the kind of revisionism that has been directed at the Habermasian “public sphere” in cultural history and critical theory. I argue that during the period that I consider—roughly 1820 to 1860—the landscape of science in culture should be revised to account for multiple, distinct, yet overlapping publics of science. In the first two chapters, I consider how a scientific culture spread vis-à-vis radical science, gentlemanly education reform, and the new “useful knowledge” industry that they helped to spawn. In the following two chapters, I apply the methods of book history to Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33). First, I examine the context of production—the gentlemanly knowledge project initiated by Charles Lyell and the aims of the Murray publishing house. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, I then examine the early periodical reception of volume one to see how reviewers from various publics helped to shape the meaning of the text for their readers. In chapter five, I trace the development of Secularism from 1840s artisan freethought, showing that Secularism advanced a methodological materialism and a morality based on materialist principles, well in advance of the new naturalism or scientific agnosticism. In the conclusion, I consider causes for the “disappearance” of such subaltern or alternative science publics as radical science, the Mechanics’ Institutes, and Secularism, from the history and historiography of science, suggesting how cultural studies of discourse can aid in their recuperation and point to possibilities for contemporary interventions in science and technology.