MIT is a canary in the coal mine for our democracy: it embodies American ingenuity, helping win WWII and producing over a hundred Nobel Prize Laureates. MIT is also more delicate than a typical university: it is not a walled garden. It has unique and necessary partnerships with industry, government, defense, nonprofits, and the innovation sector, leaving it open to influence from many directions. Its “famous decentralization” comes at the cost of robust community and can leave openings for ethical violations and difficult working conditions. It is also packed to the beaver teeth with high achievers, many of whom—for better or worse—are oddballs. In short, MIT is a target, both practically and symbolically: associating the school’s good name with a cause, product, or ideology is valuable—as is influencing the university’s direction.
The cannibalization of MIT by private interests began decades ago, but the past few years marked the beginning of a masks-off phase. As MIT’s own Lewis Report warned against in 1949, these interests are pushing MIT from university to a program of “mere vocational training”; from societal institution to yet another failed libertarian fantasyland; from source of truth to bit player in popcorn flicks.
Activist “libertarian” organizations like the Manhattan Institute, the Santa Fe Institute, and FIRE—alongside Silicon Valley moguls, other venture capitalists, and broader big business interests—apply constant pressure, wanting access to the next generation of highly-skilled technical experts, current faculty and their resources, and control of MIT itself. Quiet and powerful alliances with the MIT Corporation and some administrators and faculty already exist, but now a particular contingent is testing the waters of the MIT community at large under the banner of the MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA), whose members have inserted themselves into the curriculum and campus life, posted online content worthy of AM radio, and of course are collecting lots and lots of money along the way.
The MIT Corporation (which is the university’s board of trustees) and its Visiting Committees draw from a surprisingly repetitive roster.
For example, one of the earliest members of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, former MIT Alumni Association president, and lifetime member of the MIT Corporation is MIT alum Bob Metcalfe. Also a Professor of Innovation at UT Austin, Turing Award winner, and co-inventor of Ethernet (but also notorious for betting on the wrong horse), he is something of a royal figure in tech circles. In addition to developing the backbone of computer networking, he devised “Metcalfe’s Law” in the early 80s—the idea that the value of a network with n users is valued proportionally to n2. That is, the market mechanisms and valuation heuristic foundational to giants like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and gig economy companies (not to mention downmarket reflection, including VC investment theses focused on network effects such as Fred Wilson and USV) can all be traced to Metcalfe.
Metcalfe’s thoughts in the political realm are far less original: he pushes libertarian talking points at every opportunity—some of them radical. In an interview in 2019, Metcalfe spoke on the issue that “the richest three Americans are as wealthy as the bottom hundred and seventy million” and said: “It’s a good thing. Income inequality is a tool, it’s a way of motivating the uh, uh—motivating people to strive in a highly-competitive environment, and it gets problems solved. No, income inequality is not evil, it’s a tool.” Here we find that Metcalfe sees income inequality not as a problem to be solved, but as a tool to be wielded. No surprise that he also went on to state: “I oppose minimum wages.”
You read that right: someone who doesn’t believe the minimum wage should exist has been steering one of the most prestigious and advanced educational institutes in the history of humankind—under a lifetime appointment, no less. (Perhaps Metcalfe hopes to abolish the minimum wage in order to more easily accumulate enough money to follow the example of another of MIT Corporation lifetime member, MIT alum John Thain, who made headlines by billing Merrill Lynch thirty-five thousand dollars for a commode on legs during the bank bailouts of the late 2000s.)
These developments in the Corporation are relatively new. MIT professor of the Humanities department Ruth Perry wrote with disappointment in a Faculty Newsletter forum last year that “MIT is its faculty. You could change out the Corporation and it would still be MIT. And you could change out the administration [ . . . ] and it would still be MIT. But you could never replace the faculty and stay the same institution . . . . Our Corporation used to have more MIT faculty members on it as well as faculty from other institutions. Nowadays it is largely made up of people from the business world and even the faculty on it are faculty from business schools.”
MIT’s Corporation interacts with the campus via the MIT Visiting Committees, which “operate as advisory groups to the Corporation and the administration, offering appraisal, advice, and insight on each academic program and on other major activities at the Institute . . . . Committee recommendations and ideas are conveyed to the Corporation, senior administration, department heads and faculty through oral and written reports and on-going assessments. Committee members often visit departments on their own time to give lectures or meet with members of the departments.”
MIT professor and then-faculty chair Lily Tsai in a May 2022 statement promoted an increasingly-tight relationship between these Committees and, in her words, the “rank-and-file” professors: the Visiting Committees are “an essential mechanism for communication between faculty and Corporation members, particularly at the departmental level” and that Corporation members “have noted to me that so much of the valuable information exchange through Visiting Committees is not in the presentations and briefings, but in the informal, unscripted conversations happening along the sidelines, particularly with rank-and-file faculty.”
Recent MIT Visiting Committees have been stacked with members and affiliates of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, the Jeffrey Epstein-adjacent, and representatives of big business. Below is a partial list:
the aforementioned MIT alum John Thain, who was also at the center of an executive compensation scandal during the Great Recession, has been on the Electronic Engineering and Computer Science department’s committee;
Raymie Stata—son of MIT Corporation lifetime member Raymond Stata—who is a member of the MFSA, is currently on the Libraries Visiting Committee and, on the EECS Visiting Committee, is appointed concurrently with his father;
oil and gas giant Shell’s Corporate Chief Scientist and MIT alum Dirk Smit on the Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) committee;
MIT dropout, close business associate to Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, and ringleader of Flannery Associates (the firm behind the bizarre, shadowy plot to build a city next to ”one of the most critical military bases in the western U.S.” that triggered a federal investigation), Patrick Collison on the Mathematics committee;
San Francisco VC, former board member of Thiel’s Seasteading Institute, mentor in the Thiel Fellowship program, Santa Fe Institute trustee since 2010, former chair of the MIT Northern California alumni group, former president and chair of the MIT Alumni Association, and early member of the MFSA, MIT alum John Chisholm on a dizzying array of committees;
MFSA co-founder and past president, MIT alum Jim Rutt, currently on the Brain and Cognitive Science department’s committee;
Reid Hoffman, the Jeffrey Epstein associate and Flannery Associates investor, on the MIT Media Lab’s committee; and
Flannery Associates investor Laurene Powell Jobs, currently on the MIT Media Lab committee.
Ex-president Rafael Reif recommended Smit, Collison, Hoffman, Stata Jr., and Jobs. (And so Reif not only personally signed thank-you notes to Epstein, he also recommended an Epstein-related individual to advise the MIT Media Lab.)
Rutt, who was chairman of the Santa Fe Institute when Epstein gave a donation in 2010, was recommended by the MIT Alumni Association. In fact, we see that the MIT Alumni Association, the MIT Corporation, and the MIT Visiting Committees have significant incestuous overlap; and while Alumni Association members are also members of the Corporation, it is unclear what justifications there are for the Alumni Association ex-presidents to also receive an outsized number of Visiting Committee appointments. For example, MIT alum Kenneth Wang is a lifetime member of the MIT Corporation, was president of the MIT Alumni Association in 2010, is currently on the Visiting Committees for Student Life, the Humanities department, and was chair of the EAPS Visiting Committee. Stephen Baker, after having served as the MIT Alumni Association president, received a five-year appointment as an MIT Corporation member and is currently on the Mathematics and Physics committees and is the chair of the Music and Theater Arts committee. Similarly, Chisholm served on the Mathematics, Social Sciences, Institute for Data, Systems and Society, and Libraries committees, as well as on the committee for the Philosophy and Linguistics department as recently as late 2021.
The MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA) can be seen as MIT’s local franchise location of the campus free speech enterprise that was born out of the University of Chicago’s decade-plus-long marketing campaign which leveraged culture war rhetoric to manipulate the college’s ranking KPIs and which also birthed the Chicago Principles. The movement as a whole has a bigoted bent. Harvard’s Jeffrey Flier is one of the movement’s few cautious figureheads--though he does seem to subtly plant at least one racist idea in each of his articles. As one example, he suggests that those pesky complainers asking for equity just don’t want to work: “the key terms—diversity, equity, and inclusion—are rarely defined with specificity, and their meaning has been subtly shifting . . . . The term ‘equity,’ for instance, can imply equality of opportunity or equality of outcome.”
At MIT, Prof. Tsai, apparently always ready with a helping hand, administered the informal polls that the MFSA relies upon to justify their activities on campus—such as, for example, the farcical Ad Hoc Working Group On Free Expression. She is also one of the faculty that launched the Working Group and accepted its questionable work product. The document, showing a fundamental misunderstanding of the definition of free speech—MIT is a private institution and thus “free speech” does not apply—includes such stupidities as: “We note that the reading of the N-word, especially if it is in the context of a pedagogical objective, is protected under free speech, and thus cannot be prohibited in class.”
The document and its creators’ backgrounds suggest an abundance of potential conflicts of interest and open questions:
How was Working Group membership determined given that many in the group are signatories of the Chicago Principles for MIT and are MIT Free Speech Alliance members, and that input from the MIT Free Speech Alliance is given special weight in the report?;
Current and past presidents of the MIT Alumni Association are members of the MIT Free Speech Alliance as well as members of the Working Group, yet the report mentions “input collected by the MIT Alumni Association” without mentioning potential overlaps;
What exactly is the “recording of a small meeting of MIT alumni hosted by one of our alumni partners” that was given to the Working Group? What are its contents, what is its relevance, who is the alumni partner, and who were the MIT alumni featured?;
Why were some of the only student perspectives gathered from those taking a Libertarianism in History class given that this could be indicative of selection bias or recency bias and, thus, of skewed results?;
How is it that the only other student voice directly represented was a president of the Undergraduate Association who was recalled due to “incredibly upsetting” acts that included the ”use of hate speech” and who is also now a member of the MFSA?;
Why is a “survey of 250 MIT undergraduates conducted by the MIT Free Speech Alliance funder the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) as part of their College Free Speech Rankings” uncritically considered trustworthy?;
How is this statement from the document considered appropriate? “The eclectic interests of its faculty and students, as well as the wide range of libertarian subcultures that thrive on its campus, position the Institute to once again play an important role in the thoughtful protection of free expression.”;
Why is the Libertarianism in History class professor, who was also a member of the Working Group, now speaking at events for the MFSA, and why is said event “sponsored by” the MIT Community & Equity Office?; and
What other MIT and MIT Alumni Association resources—financial, advisory, or otherwise—are being diverted to the MFSA?
The MFSA’s efforts at MIT were supposedly galvanized by the “cancelation” of Dorian Abbot. (Presumably the organization also keeps a candle lit for the incident in their office in memoriam.) As the MFSA puts it, “Abbot was disinvited not because of what he was going to say in his lecture, but because of his opinions expressed in unrelated writing.” The opinions in question are of course wildly bigoted and would make any platform wonder whether he is capable of speaking in mixed company. For example, he compared efforts to promote campus diversity to Soviet practices that led to the Ukrainian Holodomor, saying “anti-racism and some versions of DEI promote a worldview in which group membership is a primary aspect of the human being and different groups are taught to view each other antagonistically. They tend to claim that members of certain groups are successful mostly because of some sort of ‘privilege,’ just like the Communists claimed about the Kulaks.”
The MFSA under-emphasized these facts and others: for example, that the lecture was meant for a general public audience, including children—decidedly not an audience of academics. MIT EAPS department head Robert van der Hilst explained that the lecture “isn’t a scientific talk for fellow scientists. It has a very specific format and public outreach component, seeking to build public understanding of climate science and to inspire and engage with area high school students.” Another fact conveniently omitted by MFSA is that, far from being a victim of “cancel culture,” Abbott was simply rescheduled, asked to speak to a group of his peers—actual academics—a week later. Surely we’ve all missed buses that have had more impact on the course of our futures. Regardless, a petition to endorse the Chicago Principles was passed around to MIT faculty and the Ad Hoc Working Group was assembled due in part to this tragic miscarriage of entitlement.
It seems that MIT has become one institution among many used as a stage for grievance theatrics. The tired lamentation that liberals are overrepresented on campuses is generally untrue: in fact, “thanks to the power of regents, trustees, alumni, donors and—at public institutions—state governments, some of the most powerful voices in campus politics are politically conservative.” And yet, for several years articles about cancel culture have been cropping up in the press. In contrast to the dystopian nationwide erasure of curriculum about racism and book bans that deserve the public’s actual attention, few of the examples lamented by the so-called free speech movement have anything to do with free speech, focusing instead on perceived social shaming and even self-censorship, with little evidence for actual professional or educational impact.
Take the Manhattan Institute’s Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist who foments gender controversy. In 2020, he wrote a Quillette article titled “Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise.” Finally, a chance to see this academic cancel culture in action! Surely some pink-haired pinko on a power trip—a “diversity hire,” no doubt—held an official department-wide kumbaya and, after forcing all the white, cis-gendered males to first apologize for their existence while taking a knee Kaepernick style, managed to get him fired based on the results of a collective vote of how he made everyone “feel.” This is what all of society—and academia in particular—has devolved into. Right? Well, Wright wrote, “In April, I chose to leave academia. To give credit to Penn State, I was not fired. In fact, I had the opportunity to extend my fellowship contract for another year. However, I no longer believed that any amount of hard work or talent on my part would lead to a tenure-track academic job in the current climate.” His definition of being “canceled” is to be offered a contract extension! Lord only knows how he would define “adequate treatment and compensation.” Instead, based on his “feelings,” he decided to leave—one of many such examples of professional death by autoerotic cancelation.
These incidents echo the sham “free speech” case that made it all the way to the Supreme Court case 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis earlier this year. As the Associated Press reported in an article titled “Legitimacy of ‘Customer’ in Supreme Court Gay Rights Case Raises Ethical and Legal Flags”: “A Christian graphic artist who the Supreme Court said can refuse to make wedding websites for gay couples pointed during her lawsuit to a request from a name named ‘Stewart’ and his husband-to-be. The twist? Stewart says it never happened.” Even worse, the case hinged upon the graphic artist “feeling” that they were not allowed to advertise their services as a wedding website designer. However, after the Supreme Court issued a ruling in the artist’s favor, an archive of their portfolio showed that the artist had actually been advertising their services during the time in question. The complaint, in other words, appears to be an utter fabrication.
As shown most clearly in the Abbott incident, sham grievance pushers seek to evade and erode consequences and distort measures of credibility by boosting the notion that strict boundaries can and should be drawn between their professional or technical statements and a sacrosanct set of statements they call beliefs or opinions. (Conveniently, they seem to use the words belief and opinion to refer to anything that could conceivably be a topic in a political election, rather than in the usual sense of personal motivators that are only relevant to oneself and have no bearing on others.) If the Abbot grievance sprang from sincere concerns about preserving the integrity of the scientific method and was not a publicity stunt, then speaking about his work to fellow academics should have satisfied him. Those with a political agenda seek to conflate and confuse academic censorship (suppression of legitimate academic work), free speech (relevant to government activity and protected under the First Amendment), and unrealistic fantasies about not having to think before speaking.
The Chicago Principles are worded emptily enough to receive a rubber stamp from distracted readers or performative administrators eager for empty gestures, but there are arguments presenting a compelling analysis on process grounds on the downsides of endorsement. Indeed, even the MIT professor Malick Ghachem who taught the Libertarianism in History class that participated in the Working Group is sour on the Chicago Principles, saying that “this movement is antithetical to diversity of thought, and even threatens to undermine the cause of free expression itself.”
Of course, the most critical issue with the Chicago Principles is that they are part of a toolset for outside groups to gain leverage over academic institutions. The MFSA website once hosted a copy of the dramatically-titled “Goodbye, MIT”—originally published on the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal—making noise about withholding donations, and an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Alumni Withhold Donations, Demand College Free Speech,” leaves no doubt about a coordinated project to influence multiple Western universities via the financial levers of alumni donations. There has been more momentum in the past few days, as well: as a New York Times article published on Friday put it, “Who Decides Penn’s Future: Donors or the University?”
To formalize the lever, the MFSA even set up a donor-advised fund (DAF) for alumni donations, seeking to siphon away dollars from the university to an unaffiliated investment vehicle. DAFs offer a variety of liberties to managers and contributors. Contributors receive an immediate tax write-off but do not have to dispense funds to an actual charitable cause immediately, or at all. The money grows tax free and can be dispensed at any time in the form of grants to individuals and organizations. Interestingly, donors technically have zero control over the money once it is contributed, giving managers carte blanche.
The amount of money stored in donor-advised funds has skyrocketed over the past decade and represents yet another example of the recent increase in wealthy business interests attempting to gain access to charitable and philanthropic giving as dealflow, a trend that many, such as those at the Santa Fe Institute, have labeled philanthrocapitalism: “to industrialize the process of philanthropy” rather than approach it “in a noblesse oblige way.” Epstein himself also used the DAF structure in an attempt to ensnare backers and exercise influence over a variety of individuals and institutions including the philanthrocapitalist Bill Gates.
Activist investor Bill Ackman, leader of a group of fellow VCs who jumped to gain attention from the strife in Israel and Gaza by blacklisting college students, donated “stock worth $1.34 billion to charity” that, in Ackman’s words, “will benefit humanity.” The charity in question is a donor-advised fund whose board contains Ackman, his sister, and his wife, the MIT Media Lab professor Neri Oxman. In 2019, Oxman issued an apology for receiving Epstein funds; Ackman at one point seemed to advise/threaten Joi Ito on the matter, stating that “I don’t want to see her forced into a position where to protect her name she is required to be transparent about everything that took place at MIT with Epstein.”
Using the donor-advised fund as a structure to intermediate between a charitable institution’s or university’s potential donors, including alumni, is a clever way for outside activist groups to attempt to gain financial leverage over institutions, set up chairs and endowments, obscure sources of cash, and even to profit by management fees, interest, and indirectly but powerfully via the exchange of well-timed favors. Members of the MFSA seem especially well positioned to have inside knowledge, influence, and expertise over MIT’s funding needs: in addition to former MIT Alumni Association president and Working Group partner Stephen Baker, busy beaver John Chisholm was also a former member of the MIT Alumni Fund Board.
MIT community signatories of the petition to endorse the Chicago Principles include:
Physics professor Max Tegmark who co-founded the Future of Life Institute (along with the original lender of $100 million dollars of cryptocurrency assets to Alameda Research) and who apparently signed a letter of intent to finance a pro-Nazi publication where, according to Tegmark himself, his brother had “published some articles”;
Prof. Kerry Emanuel, member of the MFSA, and one of the two professors who originally invited Dorian Abbot to MIT;
Prof. Daniel Rothman, the other professor who invited Abbot;
climate denier and MFSA member Prof. Richard Lindzen of the EAPS department, a member of the Cato Institute who has received funding from fossil fuel interests; and
Prof. Dava Newman, Joi Ito’s replacement as director of the MIT Media Lab charged with rehabilitating its public image after the Epstein imbroglio.
Sadly, there is also Prof. Noam Chomsky, who has been more vocal about “censorious” academic activism over the past few years, during which time he also developed personal and financial ties to Epstein—originally due to a bid to hang out with Woody Allen, of all people to go down for! (When asked about the relationship, Chomsky’s answer was nunya—as in bizniz, a wholly-inadequate response given that, by all appearances, Epstein’s modus operandi seems to have been co-opting powerful figures to manufacture consent.)
And let’s not forget signatories and MIT philosophy professors Brad Skow, Alex Byrne, and MIT philosophy department head Kieran Setiya. Byrne and Skow last year hosted Jesse Singal to give a talk titled “Politics and Trust in Science”— Singal has been accused by GLAAD, among other things, of “amplifying the unproven theory of social contagion.” Perhaps aspiring to some of the notoriety Singal and others have attained in the free speech grift, Prof. Byrne tweeted pictures of the controversial Singal being “mobbed by groupies after his talk” while Prof. Skow was “looking on enviously.”
This fall, Byrne and Skow helped the MFSA insert itself into the curriculum, launching a new project for freshmen on “civil discourse” via the Concourse program, which Setiya claims is an opportunity “to show by example both that controversial views are not suppressed at MIT and that we learn by engaging with them openly.” In addition to Prof. Emanuel of the Dorian Abbot fiasco, other invited speakers are the anti-birth control Mary Harrington who has taken the side of ”bad science,” climate change denier Steven Koonin, and Covid minimizer Dr. Vinay Prasad.
Note that Ben Santer, a MacArthur fellow and senior climate researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Labs—a position he held for nearly twenty years—recently resigned in protest over LLNL’s platforming of Steven Koonin. Santer, in an article for the Union of Concerned Scientists titled “Climate Denialism Has No Place At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,” explains:
Professor Koonin is not a climate scientist. I am. [ . . . . ] LLNL is participating in the dissemination of Professor Koonin’s incorrect views on climate science. This makes it more difficult for US citizens to reach informed, science-based decisions on appropriate responses to climate change. We live in a democracy. Free speech is important. It is important to hear diverse perspectives on issues of societal concern. It is equally important for US citizens to receive the best-available scientific information on the reality and seriousness of climate change . . . . The decision to invite Professor Koonin will not help LLNL to attract and retain the best and brightest climate scientists.”
If, as Prof. Ruth Perry wrote, “MIT is its faculty,” then allowing a movement that draws false equivalence between authentic work and pseudo-scientific stunts poses an existential threat to the university.
Another member of the “civil discourse” sideshow being brought on campus is UCSF’s Vinay Prasad, who, in a piece against “censorship” in science, perhaps provides the inspiration for the Concourse program when he wrote: “Let people say the wrong things sometimes.” Setting the example for the rest of us, he engages in rampant Covid denialism on Twitter, pausing only to retweet someone who is “[g]lad @TheFIREorg exists.” And, when Philadelphia’s public school district temporarily moved to virtual learning in response to bad air quality from a nearby forest fire, Prasad, as though paid by the buzzword, declared: “I really hope that in return for your repeated failure to do what is right for children we move to a voucher system that crushes your failed district and destroys your union system that always places adult interests over children.” Knee-jerk libertarian talking points are apparently more real to Prasad than the effects of smoke inhalation—on children, no less.
Jefferey Epstein was allowed to “say the wrong things” all he wanted (as long as he brought enough money along with him)—including to senior MIT and Harvard researchers, and even to then-president of Harvard Larry Summers. His controversial viewpoints on eugenics found a home at Harvard under his “interdisciplinary” Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (PED), which “helped promote a current of thought that emphasized the role that genes and heredity play in determining human behavior and that promoted the idea that the existing order is the natural result of evolutionary selection and adaptation, with such invidious influences as racism, inequality, and inherited privilege pushed to the margins,” all to further his ambition to ”seed the human race with his DNA” through genetic engineering and controlled breeding. At the MIT Media Lab, Joi Ito, after receiving funds from Epstein for both MIT research and private use, “held out hope that Epstein might make donations in the millions. For example, in August 2013, he suggested Epstein as the sponsor of a proposed center for the study of ‘deceptive design’ in evolutionary biology . . . . In April 2016, he pitched Epstein on a $12 million plan for a fellowship program in ‘antidisciplinary science.’” Thanks to this incursion, “MIT,” “Dirty Money,” and “Bad Science” can all be found in the same headline—an unthinkable possibility in better times.
The Concourse program is also partnered with an organization called Braver Angels whose mission is to address the problem of the “growing partisan animosity [which] is the crisis of our time and threatens our nation.” Its founder and board president, David Blankenhorn, is poorly equipped to execute on such a mission as he “has attacked single mothers, championed federal marriage promotion as welfare policy, railed against cohabitation and no-fault divorce, and opposed access to new reproductive technologies” and in 1988 had founded the Institute for American Values which “has been against anonymous sperm donors (because they lead to ‘fatherless’ children, an abiding preoccupation of his).” In a trial about California’s Prop. 8, he had “testified that same-sex marriage benefits gay couples and their children, but weakens the institution of marriage.” As part of that testimony, Blankenhorn “insisted that polygamy satisfied the principles of marriage because it involves a man who marries one woman at a time.” When asked whether “a man with five wives is consistent with his rule that marriage involves two people,” he responded “yes, adding that the marriages did not occur at the same time, and ‘each marriage is distinct.’” Truly a demonstration of logic worth an invitation onto MIT’s campus by its analytic philosophers.
What proportion of a student’s time and tuition should go to classes uncritically presenting pseudoscience? The answer, of course, should be zero. (Our fellow alumni would probably agree that time is a bit on the short side at MIT to begin with!) Though the MFSA would say that this does not respect a diversity of viewpoints, the fact is that universities are not internet forums come to life, where every endeavor devolves into a turn-based high school-style debate, nor are they choose-your-own-adventure books. They are definitionally mandated to discern truth and discourage poor scholarship. Indeed, the practice of distributed amplification, more commonly known by Steve Bannon’s preferred phrase “flooding the zone with shit,” demonstrates quite clearly that civility, academic freedom, and free speech are harmed not only by simplistically imposing silence, but, in modern times, by adding noise.
MIT philosophy professor Augustín Rayo apparently disagrees. He believes that the freshmen indoctrination program may “play a critical role in demonstrating—to faculty, students, staff, alumni, and friends—the institute’s commitment to free speech and civil discourse.” We assume he’ll also be ushering in street corner preachers and foreign intelligence recruitment agents next? After all, every viewpoint deserves to be heard, right? Or else people (who again?) may doubt MIT’s sum total ability to engage in civil discourse (with whom again?). Indeed, the movement attempts to undermine the scientific method itself, which already has procedures and methodologies in place to refine and vet actual hypotheses without needing to rely on nebulous vibe checks or uncritical “debates” held in front of college freshmen.
The advancement of knowledge, especially in STEM, cannot, is not, and has never been accomplished via political-style debate. The scientific method is not conducted via rhetorical debate. Engineering techniques are not devised via rhetorical debate. Mathematics is not discovered or invented via rhetorical debate. Clinical medicine is not practiced and interpreted via rhetorical debate. Testability, repeatability, reproducibility, experimental design, study—these are the tools of progress because these are the tools leveraged to conduct actual work in these fields.
Nevertheless, Rayo was recently given a powerful position as dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at MIT. Multiple announcements ostentatiously positioned him as a “Philosopher Dean.” As in, having the august loftiness of a philosopher king emitting rays of enlightened sunlight upon those beneath him (via the medium of administrative duties). We perhaps begin to understand where the idea of having Spider-Man rescue a limo-riding MIT administrator in the recent Marvel movies comes from: the managers may not have superpowers, but they control the futures of those who do; in the end, isn’t that where real power truly resides? Perhaps members of the MIT community themselves are simply tools to be wielded by management toward justification of quack ideologies?
In any case, Rayo remains well positioned to shape the beleaguered humanities department at MIT—hiding behind the banner of philosophy to push “freedom of speech.” Rayo, Setiya, Byrne, Skow: are they closer to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle or to Anytus, Meletus, and Lycon? The downside of MIT’s “famous decentralization” becomes clear: the pursuit of objective truth, praxis, and wisdom has already been gutted by the incursion of a tired roster of wealthy interests—if these are the champions of science and technology, then it is no wonder humanity has made so little progress on climate change.
Besides formal curriculum, another vital campus intervention hosted by the MFSA was ”Orwell: Past, Present, and Pizza.” Prof. Tegmark was a speaker—presumably his keen knowledge of dystopian science-fantasy (what he would call effective altruism and longtermism) qualified him to speak. Also in attendance was eugenicist and Harvard neuroscience professor Steven Pinker. This is not the first time the pair has shared a stage: for example, both attended an event at EDGE in 2014—”an exclusive intellectual boys club,” as BuzzFeed News put it, that “Jeffrey Epstein bought his way into.” While Pinker’s relationship with Epstein is already well documented—Pinker had contributed to Epstein’s legal defense—it is worth noting that the EDGE event also included MIT professor Seth Lloyd, who had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Epstein. As The Tech recently published: “Don’t be surprised by the administration’s decision on Seth Lloyd” as “top MIT administrators who enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking operation are still covering their tracks.”
Orwell would surely just be pleased as punch to have his work co-opted by such interesting individuals, ones who seem to hold such a syncretic set of beliefs. And Orwell would certainly approve of the MFSA’s plans—now scrubbed from the internet—to fund and install “a Dean of Free Speech, Viewpoint Diversity, and Academic Freedom,” as well as the fact that the unaffiliated group has set up an incident hotline to report directly to them for “potential follow up data collection by an investigative organization.” Remember to upload pictures and videos as you continually surveil each other! A member of the MIT Corporation or one of their goons—acting via an unofficial channel which is not only funded by outside interests but is also co-founded by a Jeffrey Epstein donation recipient—may soon be reaching out to hear your side of an anonymous accusation they claim to have received. There is nothing to fear: they “will act only after we have heard from all sides.”
Consider that FIRE (where the MFSA’s executive director last worked) itself has repeatedly defended Turning Point USA’s encroachment onto university campuses. Turning Point has links to white nationalists and is the largest beneficiary on a list of extremist groups, compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, that receive millions of dollars from donor-advised funds. In fact, just a few days ago, Turning Point members allegedly assaulted an instructor at ASU, leading the school’s president to issue a stern rebuke, writing that “[i]t is stunning for Turning Point USA leadership to endorse, defend and fund such activity in the name of ‘freedom.’”
Under the guise of viewpoint diversity, FIRE is also suing California community colleges for enacting anti-racist policies. A chemistry professor represented by FIRE implores, “How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”
Clearly there should be no need for “anti-racism” to have relevance to “the atomic mass of boron”—except, of course, that the extremely-conspicuous lessons of modern science history teach us otherwise. Individuals more well informed than members of the FIRE organization may remember a little something called Jüdische Physik, Nazi Germany’s notorious pseudo-scientific policy declaring so-called “Jewish physics” inferior to Arische Physik—that is, “Aryan physics.” So yes, universities must be vigilant in guarding against the accumulation of odd beliefs and agendas perhaps especially in STEM—the disciplines from which we make dangerous and powerful tools. The California Community Colleges framework, which states that faculty should “[t]ake care not to ‘weaponize’ academic freedom and academic integrity as tools to impede equity” is therefore wholly appropriate. (On a side note, it’s funny they should mention boron, as boron and cadmium impurities in graphite may have been largely responsible for the setback of the Nazi nuclear research program. As the author of the paper “Walther Bothe’s Graphite: Physics, Impurities, and Blame in the German Nuclear Program” concluded: had events unfolded differently, the “subsequent history would have been very different.”)
Given FIRE’s association with violent far-right organizations, it should come as no surprise that FIRE’s co-founder and current board member Harvey Silverglate recently penned an article titled ”Abolish the FBI” in which he called the January 6 insurrection “just an old-fashioned riot” because “its perpetrators could not have realistically thought that they could overthrow the federal government.” Never mind that a cache of assault weapons was being stored nearby by the Oath Keepers for a “quick reaction force.” As an insurrectionist testified, “he had not seen so many [firearms] in one place since his days in the military.” Had we abolished the FBI, as Silverglate has repeatedly advocated for since the insurrection, we may have never heard the testimony of FBI agent Hilgeman, that “the storming of the Capitol was only the beginning, part of a larger seditious plan to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden,” and that the “quick reaction force” may have been meant “to occupy the city and prevent Joe Biden from ever becoming president.” An “old-fashioned riot,” indeed.
Silverglate is also a member of the MFSA—despite having no known affiliation to MIT beyond representing a student in a copyight infringement case and giving talks with “suggestions for how liberty-loving people on campus can fight back” nearly thirty years ago. He does seem quite opinionated, however, on more recent events, writing in 2019 that MIT “has been bending over backwards to appease the public by issuing mea culpas for various complicities, imagined or otherwise, stemming from the university’s ties to Epstein,” referring to a statement issued by Reif as a “groveling apology.” Silverglate, also a Cato Institute member with a Manhattan Institute profile, demonstrated his embarrassingly-plethoric moral concerns by stating that “for the institutions that put Epstein’s donations to good use, Epstein’s motivations, however dubious, have no moral relevance. Sometimes bad people bring about good.” To borrow from the Crimson article on Epstein, Silverglate “is not [an MIT] alum. Nor is he a faculty member or an affiliate of the University.” Nonetheless, the interloper presses on a radical vision to reshape the school.
What is at stake is the total perversion of the public’s understanding of STEM and academia itself—what their strengths and limitations are, how they function, how they are guided both by internal self-correction and by external regulation—to be replaced with an ill-informed blanket “skepticism” and quasi-religious appeals to libertarian free-market ideals. The destruction of the public’s confidence in societal institutions is the ultimate goal of the so-called free speech movement. Indeed, the entire movement is a petulant “nuh-uh” or “no u” aimed at aping and subverting any and all efforts to end systemic injustices.
”Viewpoint diversity” is nothing more than an attempt to cripple the marketplace of ideas while pretending to appeal to it. Common sense tells us that it is possible for there to be viewpoints unsuitable for platforming depending on context. In the academic context it is unsuitable to uncritically platform pseudoscience, obsolescence, or attitudes that are contrary to physical safety and study. Indeed, the weaponization of pseudoscience by the political right relies on repetition of this tactic: they demand their view be heard under the guise of “wanting a debate”; they then appeal to civility or claim ad hominem attacks when their ideas are subjected to the typical scrutiny of the process. Efforts to enshrine libertarian pet theories and the agendas of monied interests in this fashion are equivalent to a mechanism that halts societal and intellectual progress at the very places designated by society for experimentation and evolution of human thought and society: institutes of higher learning. Even the early libertarian Michael Polanyi himself identified pseudoscience as a greater threat to the scientific endeavor than institutional resistance or inertia, writing in The Logic of Liberty that “[w]e must admit that the existing body of science—or at any rate its fundamental beliefs—is an orthodoxy in the West,” but that this orthodoxy prevents the funding “for the advancement of astrology or sorcery.”
It is plain to see why the notion that simple, performative debates as a core tool of technical progress would be highly attractive to wealthy tech interests—the looser standards of truth and verification are, the more everything is a matter of belief, opinion, and profitability in the market; the more room there is for deal-making and manufactured success via market manipulation and hype with no accountability.
In the sciences, we see a successful implementation of profit-by-avoiding-testability at the Santa Fe Institute, which has for decades walked the line between research institution and libertarian think tank, all under the broad mandate of “complexity theory” (which they carefully define as not quite doing science; instead, they “invent new concepts to render up complex reality to science” and focus on behavior “that can be investigated rather modestly through observation or experiment.”) Harvard professor Erik Baker notes that “right-wing funders who loom large at para-academic institutes such as SFI helped promulgate new understandings of what it means to be a scientist or intellectual”—is the shadowiness of the Santa Fe Institute what MIT is headed for if it continues to entertain defining itself as an institution with explicit libertarian leanings?
Begun in earnest by Manhattan Project physicists as a place to continue basic research, SFI’s board was taken over by business figures within a few years of its founding due to eagerness for funding. Indeed, shortly before resigning as President, Santa Fe Institute founder George Cowen lamented that, “because the world out there responds to the notion of new ideas about economics more quickly than to any of the other notions we’re kicking around . . . the Institute has moved more rapidly in that direction than caution might have indicated.” Prof. Perry’s sentiments hint at this transformation back east: “MIT has become the R&D arm of the technology and business community–instrumentally geared to serve industry rather than to develop a balanced educational institution. The irony, of course, is that this corporate and entrepreneurial culture will be less creative than its earlier intellectual exploratory version.”
A notable related tactic is to delegitimize scientific journals in favor of pre-print servers. For example, this breathless WSJ editorial “How ‘Preapproved Narratives’ Corrupt Science” lauds Patrick Brown who published a climate science paper in Nature and then later attacked the publication for accepting it. (Brown is a co-director at the Breakthrough Institute—which has on its board MIT alum and MIT Corporation member Ray Rothrock.)
Brown claims that: “In my paper, we didn’t bother to study the influence of . . . other obviously relevant factors. Did I know that including them would make for a more realistic and useful analysis? I did. But I also knew that it would detract from the clean narrative centered on the negative impact of climate change and thus decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.” So here Brown has apparently done work that he believes may be limited or may bear further study, and he blames this “self-censorship” on every reader and reviewer of Nature—that is, everyone but himself—and now wants everyone to know about it and admire him. Why pull this stunt? Here comes the plug, which oddly sounds as though it were based off of a nasal decongestant commercial: “I left academia over a year ago, partially because I felt the pressures put on academic scientists caused too much of the research to be distorted. Now, as a member of a private nonprofit research center, The Breakthrough Institute, I feel much less pressure to mold my research to the preferences of prominent journal editors and the rest of the field.” (Feel less pressure now! Ask your doctor about how the Breakthrough Institute can alleviate your feelings of self-censorship today!) In other words, he doesn’t plan on being cited, and that’s fine by him because he now has private backers to please.
There have also been efforts to cast these efforts to delegitimize science as patriotic. As a member of the American Enterprise Institute recently wrote in an article advocating for Covid lab-leak theories: “A politics of trust would bode ill not only for expert institutions but also for democratic society. Trust may be indispensable to the functioning of modern societies. But too much trust in large, impersonal systems of expert knowledge is antithetical to democratic self-governance. A healthy politics strikes a balance between the two: institutional trust leavened by healthy skepticism.” On the contrary, systems of expertise enable democratic self-governance by providing high-quality information. Blanket skepticism is of no use without critical thought—such a state of mind would paralyze a person in useless and unsatisfiable doubt. (Though a nation thus paralyzed would make plenty of business opportunities for those who ideologically appeal to market design as the solution to all problems: profitability would then become the ultimate arbiter of truth.)
The MFSA has engaged in faux patriotism as well, recently providing an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in yet another ”free-speech” case on whether or not “university bias-response teams . . . objectively chill students’ speech in violation of the First Amendment.” No surprise as they also have close connections to the Manhattan Institute, a far-right think tank headed by billionaire Paul Singer, the once-secret patron of Supreme Court Justice Alito, whom he lavished with private jet trips to luxury vacations. And on the Manhattan Institute’s board is the wife of billionaire Harlan Crow—a couple who are ”very dear friends” of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and who own the house where the Justice’s mother lives rent-free, pay the tuition for the Justice’s grandnephew, and who have amassed a collection of Nazi memorabilia which contains not one but two ”Hitler originals.” Also to be found in the stash is a signed copy of Mein Kampf—it would likely be personalized as well if only Father Time could as easily be bought.
Billionaire Leonard Leo and Singer also led a private meeting between Thomas and “a group of high-net-worth donors.” The location, unbelievably, was on the premises of the Supreme Court itself—perhaps so that they could appraise the property in preparation for an eventual buyout (or hostile takeover). Given that MIT alum Sam Bankman-Fried and associates donated to/bought a full one-third of US legislators and have had special access to Democrats through Barbara Fried’s Mind the Gap PAC, it seems both law and justice in this country now readily accept patronage from technocrats and oligarchs, often selling themselves at discount rates for plane tickets or waived rent, no less. The land of opportunity is quickly becoming the land of the opportunistic.
The Manhattan Institute has a long history of targeting the justice system on behalf of corporate and monied interests—and of heavily utilizing MIT credentials, as well. Back in the early nineties, the now-deceased MIT alum and professor Peter Huber made a name for himself by pushing for tort reform in an attempt to make it harder to sue corporations and other entities for harm and wrongdoing via the civil justice system. He did this by the rather counterintuitive method of writing a popular book collecting cherry-picked incidents of flawed expert witness testimony, thereby making the term “junk science” a household phrase. Huber was a member of the Manhattan Institute’s Judicial Studies Program and was critical to their attack on the civil justice system: as the Program's Mission Statement and Overview documents, then-Vice President Dan Quayle cited him, and Huber and his work appear in half of all the major accomplishments listed in a timeline.
Huber also managed to attract the ire of the convicted Trump co-conspirator Kenneth Chesebro who at the time noted that “even those closest to Huber do not appear to view him, on the issues of ‘tort reform’ and ‘junk science,’ as a serious scholar.” Chesebro provided a telling quote from that group’s Mission Statement:
Journalists need copy, and it’s an established fact that over time they’ll “bend” in the direction in which it flows. For that reason it is imperative that a steady stream of understandable research, analysis and commentary supporting the need for liability reform be produced. If, sometime during the present decade, a consensus emerges in favor of serious judicial reform, it will be because millions of minds have been changed, and only one institution is powerful enough to bring that about: the combined force of the nation’s print and broadcast media . . . . [Emphasis theirs]
The Mission Statement also states that: “An essential element of successful policy advocacy is taking the initiative: the side proposing change most often ends up setting the agenda . . . (and) have an easier time introducing fresh concepts.” And, interestingly, the Mission Statement, originally published in 1992, states that they are focused on a “broader agenda for the nineties” (emphasis theirs), clearly indicating a purview spanning at least one—if not multiple—decades.
Stephen Daniels of the American Bar Foundation seems to agree, pointing out that, in fact, these core manipulation strategies are still being employed by the Manhattan Institute to this day—namely toward the very topics that are now in contention in popular discourse:
[T]he ballot box and education, particularly public education, [] are under attack as well. The idea of legitimacy is a battleground and the challenges are great today. Whether one wants to say it is greater than in the past, I do not know, but it is quite serious . . . . If you look at, for instance, [] the Manhattan Institute’s attack on the idea of critical race theory, it’s the same strategy used when they were going after the civil justice system in the 1990s.”
In keeping with this agenda, Manhattan Institute members are well known for making startlingly-racist remarks. Diane Yap tweets obsessively about African Americans while appealing to the tired “model minority” trope. Another member, Heather Mac Donald, denies police brutality, mockingly suggesting that events such as a “young Memphis mother abducted, raped, and killed” instead be labeled as “jogging while white.”
Mac Donald, disturbingly, was recently hosted by the MFSA in a “debate” on DEI held on MIT’s campus. Mac Donald’s “opposition” was Pamela Denise Long, a person who recently defended Ron DeSantis, saying: “He’s on to something. Today’s DEI is a big grift that grafts advocacy for sexual preferences and illegal immigrants onto the outstanding obligations due to the descendants of U.S. slaves. Under the guise of representing Black Americans, DEI subordinates our interests to the aims new, sometimes manufactured victim groups. It’s time to say that DEI must die.” She then goes on to condemn “Black leaders who are funded by white liberals” because “they are too afraid to lose sponsorship from white DEI powerbrokers,” whom she describes as “a group of people who found a way to make themselves ‘minorities’ based on lifestyle choices.”
The “debate” was also “moderated” by Nadine Strossen, a member of FIRE, who will be returning to MIT in a few days to “moderate” yet another MFSA “debate.” (Last year, the MIT Linguistics and Philosophy department also platformed her.) She is also a founding member of the still-unaccredited University of Austin. The “university” has a cast of familiar characters: Dorian Abbot; Breakthrough Institute co-founder Michael Shellenberger; Palantir co-founder and Thiel acolyte Joe Lonsdale; and close Epstein associate Larry Summers.
Over the summer, the “university” also put on the ”Forbidden Courses” (yes, that’s what they are actually called). The locale? Old Parkland, an ”Exclusive, Bizarre Enclave of Family Offices” which, in its day-to-day property management operations, rejects potential lessees for arbitrary reasons; in the case of a private equity investor, because he “didn’t wear the right deodorant.” The property is owned by “forbidden artifact” collector Harlan Crow.
The racism pushed by these organizations goes far beyond pettiness, moving well into the dystopian. Over the summer the MFSA also held a conference with keynote speaker, Manhattan Institute member, University of Austin member, and MIT alum Glenn Loury.
Loury, following in Huber's footsteps, hosts a podcast called “The Glenn Show – Presented by Manhattan Institute” where he discusses “[r]ace, inequality, and economics in the US and throughout the world.” An example of his top-notch analysis is that “[t]here are black billionaires” and that “black Americans have ten times the per capita income of the average Nigerian” which to him “disprove[] the premise that the American Dream does not apply to black people.” Not of concern, apparently, is the ever-widening wealth gaps between American racial and ethnic groups, which in some cases is at a ten-to-one disparity ratio, nor the fact that the United States and Nigeria are two entirely different countries. Here Loury pushes an increasingly-common libertarian talking point: that the existence of some hypothetical path to outsize wealth, no matter what that path may be or how rare a possibility it represents, somehow proves the nonexistence of opportunity gaps in daily life.
Loury also discussed a previous guest on his show, AEI member Charles Murray, the well-known pseudo-scientific racist, who pushes notions of genetic determinism—the idea that genetics is tightly coupled with even the most complex social behavior.
Loury stated:
It is very clear if you look at the composition of the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, whatever, that African Americans are vastly overrepresented amongst people who do this. This does not necessarily mean that white men can’t jump, it just means that amongst those who can jump the very, very, highest, the quickest, and the most agile, white men are underrepresented in comparison to the numbers in the population. Is there a genetic component to that? I don’t know, but how could you rule that out a priori, how could you just, just miss this possibility? Well, likewise, the people who do string theory are not a random draw on the population, they’re like the guys who can make it into the NBA or the NFL, they’re one in a thousand, they’re one in ten thousand. If blacks are underrepresented in that realm, do I know as a matter of fact that population differences in genetic makeup have nothing to do with that outcome? I mean, that’s, that’s a political, not a scientific position. That’s a question that seems to me that has to be allowed to be investigated.
We see similar ruminations out of the Santa Fe Institute, which also assimilated the late Cormac McCarthy. His last publication, Stella Maris, appeared shortly before his death. A main character, the daughter of a Manhattan Project physicist, was written as an unparalleled genius but spouts genetic determinism as well: “Jews represent two percent of the population and eighty percent of the mathematicians. If those numbers were even a little more skewed we’d be talking about a separate species.” (Readers familiar with the author’s previous work might be surprised by what they find in the book for reasons beyond its pseudoscience quackery: in place of his typical haunting prose, we find what reads like LLM soup gelled into a solid via a decision-by-committee process.)
If these ideas seem insane and contrary to the levelheadedness assumed of technically-minded individuals, you are absolutely correct. Unused to public scrutiny after decades of bipartisan special treatment, the Silicon Valley echo chamber is melting down in response to a decrease in zero-interest federal loan subsidies as well as an increase in predictable public skepticism following various scandals like FTX, Silicon Valley Bank, and OpenAI’s complaints about regulation proposals given their deceptive lobbying efforts. Their breakdown manifests as a petulant but powerful and well-funded radicalization toward not just more extreme forms of libertarianism, but contrarianism in general—including a rush toward pseudoscience and anti-democracy—and it is difficult to see how it will end smoothly. It would probably be wise for MIT faculty and alumni to do what they can to help MIT maintain distance from their self-destruction.
Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz—a 2023 “Forbidden Courses” lecturer—just laid a rotten egg of a manifesto replete with references to the Futurist Manifesto (written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, one of the earliest members of the Italian Fascist Party who also co-authored the Italian Fascist Manifesto). The screed conveniently summarizes the broad worldview of the libertarian-gone-wild Silicon Valley tech sector to which MIT has become an integral feeder school and partner. We find mentioned “free speech” as well as a retcon of the term scientific method to instead mean “challenging the authority of experts.” The billionaire lists various aspects of daily life as “enemies,” such as “sustainability,” “social responsibility,” “stakeholder capitalism,” “Precautionary Principle,” “trust and safety,” “tech ethics,” “risk management,” and “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” And in an ironic fit of projection: “Our enemy is institutions [sic] that in their youth were vital and energetic and truth-seeking, but are now compromised and corroded and collapsing–blocking progress in increasingly desperate bids for continued relevance, frantically trying to justify their ongoing funding despite spiraling dysfunction and escalating ineptness.”
Never one for original thought, instead of the dreaded “credentialed experts” Andreessen apparently prefers to parrot the unorthodox ideas of Nick Land, whom he enthusiastically references to describe the tech sector as a perpetual motion machine: “Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance.” Nick Land is the founder of the Dark Enlightenment neo-Fascist movement which “borrows from Enlightenment scientific racism to make the case for eugenics and racial segregation, but rejects Enlightenment egalitarianism and democratic virtues.” This ideology is also at the foundation of Silicon Valley’s culty effective accelerationism—often abbreviated “e/acc”—which can be found on numerous Twitter profiles belonging to Silicon Valley insiders such as Y Combinator president and CEO Gary ”take over every nation in the world” Tan (which itself is co-founded by MIT professor and convicted felon Robert Morris).
Land, who believes that Murray is too afraid to cross the “edginess horizon,” discusses in a now-deleted 2014 blog post titled “Hyper-Racism” how “space colonization will inevitably function as a highly-selective genetic filter,” expanding on Murray’s pseudoscience. For example:
Assortative mating tends to genetic diversification. This is neither the preserved diversity of ordinary racism, still less the idealized genetic pooling of the anti-racists, but a class-structured mechanism for population diremption, on a vector towards neo-speciation. It implies the disintegration of the human species, along largely unprecedented lines, with intrinsic hierarchical consequence. The genetic self-filtering elite is not merely different—and becoming ever more different—it is explicitly superior according to the established criteria that allocate social status . . . . If [socioeconomic status]-based assortative mating is taking place, humanity (and not only society) is coming apart, on an axis whose inferior pole is refuse. [Emphases theirs]
In other words, Land suggests that a new species will emerge or is being engineered from the existing socioeconomic elite, which will be “explicitly superior” to humans as we now know them—and others will be seen as “refuse.” More science fiction nonsense. In his mind, everyone is a eugenicist: he sets up a false dichotomy by implying that “anti-racists” seek “idealized genetic pooling” as opposed to simply not fantasizing about making a genetic Übermensch. He rebrands racism as “preserved diversity,” painting racial purity notions as biodiverse.
Land concludes: “On the sweetness-and-light side, racists and anti-racists can be expected to eventually bond in a defensive fraternity, when they recognize that traditionally-differentiated human populations are being torn asunder on an axis of variation that dwarfs all of their established concerns.” In other words, if a set of socioeconomic elites who actually believe in this craziness were to proactively work toward this goal, their strategy would clearly be to manipulate both “racists” and “anti-racists” of the “lower classes,” pitting them against each other as clandestine efforts toward “neo-speciation” (or, for that matter, even good, old-fashioned roll-ups of power) proceed behind the scenes. While Land’s motive in describing this hypothetical is no doubt in part to try to make “traditional” racism sound appealing by comparison to some other “socioeconomic speciation,” Jeffrey Epstein’s Lebensborn program—which was set up just a few minutes’ drive from the Santa Fe Institute (as well as strategically-important facilities like Los Alamos National Labs, Sandia National Labs, and White Sands Missile Range)—suggests that, with enough funding, these types of ideas could potentially be galvanizing forces toward unsavory ends and partnerships.
Neo-speciation—and similar trends toward pseudoscience—cannot be safely ignored: it is not the result of ineffectual raving or senility. It is one of the hack dystopian visions that drive the more mainstream libertarian concept of natural aristocracy. For a public softened by exposure to enough pseudoscience, especially if pushed by reputable institutions like MIT, neo-speciation and other biology-ish misrepresentations could provide a key mechanism to justify a natural aristocracy determined by “success in the market.”
The groundwork was laid down by libertarian Hans Herman Hoppe, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Presumably having spent too much time at the medieval castle-themed Excalibur Hotel on the Vegas Strip, he writes in A Short History of Man:
What I mean by natural aristocrats, nobles and kings here is simply this: In every society of some minimum degree of complexity, a few individuals acquire the status of a natural elite . . . . [B]ecause of selective mating and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are often passed on within a few “noble” families. It is to the heads of such families with established records of superior achievement, farsightedness and exemplary conduct that men typically turn with their conflicts and complaints against each other. It is the leaders of the noble families who generally act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge, out of a sense of civic duty.
Hoppe then adds more of his signature “genetics” nonsense to his childlike view of aristocracy, explaining his belief that the Industrial Revolution is “the result of the ‘breeding,’ over many generations, of a more intelligent population. Higher intelligence translated into greater economic success, and greater economic success combined with selective marriage- and family-policies translated into greater reproductive success . . . . This combined with the laws of human genetics and civil inheritance produced over time a more intelligent, ingenious and innovative population.” Here, we see no understanding of the accumulative effects of all intangibles—knowledge, technique, craft, technology, strategy, policy; all is pushed aside in favor of simplistic appeals to property rights and genetic superiority.
According to Hoppe, of prime import is the “problem of balancing land and population size,” that when a “high level of intelligence is lacking, population growth must lead to lower—and not to higher—per capita incomes.” Historically—and, presumably, in a resource-constrained future such as the one climate change all but promises—economic boons are “always eaten up quickly by a growing population that again encroached upon the available means of subsistence and led to overpopulation and the emergence of the ‘supernumerary specimen’ for whom there was no space in the division of labor and who consequently had to die out silently or become a menace (an economic ‘bad’) in the form of beggars, vagrants, plunderers, bandits, or warriors.” According to Hoppe, “supernumerary specimens”—that is, excessive humans in the population—are to blame for the collective misery experienced not by all humans but chiefly by those who participated in the division of labor: “Income and wages were held down near subsistence level owing to the existence of a substantial class of supernumerary specimens.”
Socioeconomic status and income, then, become key market-based indicators, “fitness metrics” of the human that measure one’s performance in the market via a grand crackpot theory combining Social Darwinism, laissez-faire capitalism, and copious race science. Just as firms live and die according to their performance in the market, so too shall humans. And, to deal with the problem of “supernumerary specimens,” a legal framework which eliminates the universality of human rights would likely be required so as to empower the “natural aristocrats” with population selection.
Joe Lonsdale, another Thiel acolyte, last month published a piece titled ”Jefferson and America’s Lost Idea: Natural Aristocracy,” an attempt to attach an American provenance to these decidedly anti-democratic ideas. Lonsdale, who also co-founded OpenGov—a SaaS company with over a thousand contracts with various US local, county, and state governmental entities—carefully only cites the Jeffersonian variation of a natural aristocracy, no doubt because Palantir and OpenGov have clients which are largely constructions of and participants in democratic processes. He states that “[m]any of us are fighting for our civilization” by, among other initiatives, “building the University of Austin (UATX) to reinvigorate higher education.”
(It should be noted that Lonsdale in particular should probably not be “building” universities as he was banned from Stanford’s campus for ten years for dating multiple students, at least one of whom was under his official mentorship at the time and who later “sought counseling for physical and emotional abuse.” In addition to such Jeffersonian relationships, he has also made Jeffersonian statements such as: “A real view: average black culture needs to step it up and stop having as many kids born out of wedlock.”)
In Land’s Dark Enlightenment manifesto, however, we find the beginning of the real trail of breadcrumbs that explains the technocrats’ fascination with this idea, with explicit arguments for monarchy based in part on Hoppe: while “Hoppe advocates an anarcho-capitalist ‘private law society,’ [] between monarchy and democracy he does not hesitate” to side with monarchism. He then quotes an interview where Hoppe states:
[A]s a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in his monopolistic exploitation of this ‘property.’ Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and nobility who regard their country as their private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés’ advantage.
Land goes on to agree: “[p]olitical agents invested with transient authority by multi-party democratic systems have an overwhelming (and demonstrably irresistible) incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible rapidity and comprehensiveness.”
As an aside, it should be noted that these are merely derivative, watered-down ideas based on what appears to be a highly-selective reading of Jouvenal (whom Hoppe cites in his works). See, for example, this passage from On Power:
It was, in the olden days, the monarchic principle which had to double the parts of a directing egoism and of an identification of itself with the social mass. And in this way the institution of monarchy, so far from merely subsuming the interests of the mass into those of one man, became sensitive to every wound received by every little cell. A secure hold on Power and its descent in a regular line assured the maximum of identification of egoism with the general advantage. Whereas, contrariwise, a transient or precarious hold on Power tends to make of the nation merely the instrument of a personal destiny, of an egoism which resists absorption in the whole. The more quickly the holders of Power succeed each other, the less completely can their egoism be extended to a body which is but their mount of a day. Their ego stands more apart and takes its enjoyments in more vulgar fashion . . . . It is the public service which is the repository of that sublimated sort of egoism which is the preservative of Power.
Laughably, Hoppe (and Land, the copy of a copy) apparently failed to heed Jouvenal’s warnings not to cherry-pick from his work:
At the start of this undertaking it is necessary to clear away all misconception, whether it proceeds from the emotions or from the reason. No reasonable explanation of political phenomena in the concrete is possible if the reader—as in these days, alas, he is but too prone to do—runs away with one piece of the argument, either to justify with it his own emotional approach or to attack it in the name of that approach. Suppose, for example, that he extracts from the concept of pure Power an apology for aggressive egoism as a principle of organization, then, in seeing even the germ of such an apology in this concept, he is guilty of wishful seeing. And the same is true if he reaches the conclusion that Power, being evil in its root, is therefore basically evil in action.
Hoppe and Silicon Valley emperor Peter Thiel have direct connections as well. Thiel, the lovable scamp who wrote in 2009 “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” also attended the Property and Freedom Society annual conference, an organization created in 2006 by Hoppe focusing, in their words, on “uncompromising intellectual radicalism”—which, as the Southern Poverty Law Centered reported, apparently means “welcom[ing] white nationalists, including several of the most prominent white nationalists in America.”
We also find Thiel’s protégé and venture capitalist Blake Masters—seen here in what is purportedly an ad for his past Senate run but which one could imagine may one day be titled “Exhibit A” in a case about mysterious disappearances in the Tucson desert—referencing Hoppe in a series of unhinged emails to his Stanford University housing co-op. One of the references is a 1995 paper where Hoppe writes:
[A] positive alternative to monarchy and democracy—the idea of a natural order—must be spelled out and understood. On the one hand, and simply enough, this involves the recognition that it is not exploitation, either monarchical or democratic, but private property, production, and voluntary exchange that are the ultimate source of human civilization. On the other hand, psychologically more difficult to accept, it involves the recognition of a fundamental sociological insight (which incidentally also helps identify precisely where the historic opposition to monarchy went wrong): that the maintenance and preservation of a private property based exchange economy requires as its sociological presupposition the existence of a voluntarily acknowledged “natual” elite—a nobilitas naturalis.
The natural outcome of the voluntary transactions between various private property owners is decidedly non-egalitarian, hierarchical and elitist. As the result of widely diverse human talents, in every society of any degree of complexity a few individuals quickly acquire the status of an elite. Owing to superior achievements in wealth, wisdom, bravery or a combination thereof, some individuals come to posses “natural authority,” and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. [Emphases theirs]
When elaborating on the idea of nobilitas naturalis in the paper, Hoppe also cites Wilhelm Röpke—the outspoken Nazi critic and ordoliberal economist whose work heavily informed the deliberate organization of post-war Germany which led to the subsequent West German economic miracle. We find that Röpke too held elitist, racist views. But, it is interesting to contrast Hoppe’s cynical, perverse, and virulent form of the concept with Röpke’s values-based—if naïve—view of the natural aristocrat:
We need a natural nobility whose authority is, fortunately, readily accepted by all men, an elite deriving its title solely from supreme performance and peerless moral example and invested with the moral dignity of such a life. Only a few from every stratum of society can ascend into this thin layer of natural nobility. The way to it is an exemplary and slowly maturing life of dedicated endeavor on behalf of all, unimpeachable integrity, constant restraint of our common greed, proved soundness of judgment, a spotless private life, indomitable courage in standing up for truth and law, and generally the highest example. This is how the few, carried upward by the truest of the people, gradually attain to a position above the classes, interests, passions, wickedness, and foolishness of men and finally become the nation’s conscience. To belong to this group of moral aristocrats should be the highest and most desirable aim, next to which all the other triumphs of life are pale and insipid.
Let there be no mistake: when Röpke defines nobilitas naturalis, he describes “moral aristocrats” in the sense of those from any situation in life who are dedicated to an egalitarian vision in which we overcome the shared weaknesses, such as greed, of our human nature—for example, he even believes that “trade-union leaders” should be included. He is not referring to an aristocracy defined by success in the market or standardized test scores. The “supreme performance” he speaks of is not manipulating markets, orchestrating perpetual monopolies, or pre-engineering successes, as these activities would contradict the morality and dignity he appeals to. Thus he was not referencing cryptocurrency grifters, disaster capitalists, and no, not even Iron Man in his description of a so-called “natural aristocracy.” Indeed, Röpke even wrote that “men of science, too, are generally neither saints nor heroes.”
Given his spiritual successors in the overlapping radical libertarian and “free speech” circles, Röpke, regarding natural aristocrats, most tellingly also wrote that: “No free society, least of all ours, which threatens to degenerate into mass society, can subsist without such a class of censors.” We see the seed of elitist corruption from the very beginning of this line of thought: those who fixate on the concept of some kind of “natural aristocracy” are and ironically for some time have been envisioning a pervasive censorious rule. While Röpke feared “mass society” or mob rule, his successors cannot even brook democracy. Perhaps just as how some feel that “[i]ncome inequality is a tool,” speech rights too are seen as just another implement to wield.
Appeals to a “natural” elite class are a perfect example of Niebuhr’s observation in Moral Man and Immoral Society that: “Special privileges make all men dishonest. The purest conscience and the clearest mind is prostituted by the desire to prove them morally justified.” Proponents appeal to their IQ scores and its correlation to their incomes while remaining silent about the explicit design by the entirety of society to link the two, and from there they instead gauchely venture into the realms of eugenics and social Darwinism. It must again be emphasized that people in governance entirely constructed the circumstances from which they now claim superiority. Darwinian justification has absolutely no place in a situation where the reward system was entirely engineered: one cannot be further from the natural, Darwinian world than in the deliberate design and organization of a superpower’s society. As Oreskes and Conway wrote this year in The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, the idea “that it was a benefit of capitalism that a rich man had the freedom to” self-fund academic pursuits results in a landscape of “intellectual competition” which simply boils down to “a rich man’s game: survival of the fittest becomes the triumph of the richest. Then, in circular logic, the survivors credit their survival to their own superiority, rather than, as Darwin would have stressed, the randomness of inherited wealth, inherited racial privilege, and inherited social position.”
The sobering question becomes: how much of the $35 billion under management at Andreessen Horowitz is dedicated to insane and cynical notions? What about the $11 billion under management by Thiel’s Founders Fund? Or the Y Combinator portfolio with a collective valuation of over a trillion dollars? Or MIT’s $23 billion dollar endowment? And, how much of MIT’s and other legitimate institutions’ time, energy, and other resources have been swept up in the insanity while climate disasters proceed unaddressed, even unacknowledged? Many of the corruptions we are now witnessing can be seen simply as engineering problems and poor—or simply expired—constructions. That is, MIT and other institutions that have experienced incursions of anti-democratic ideologies must have specific—and, to the minds of those who still retain objectivity and ability, correctable—architectural flaws. Our society was originally shaped and is continually in the process of being reshaped—for the worse, as has been the habit of late; or, with some deliberation and foresight, for the better.
