The Great Awokening

The Dispatch’s own Andrew Egger and Declan Garvey join Steve for a discussion on the ...

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The Dispatch’s own Andrew Egger and Declan Garvey join Steve for a discussion on the blow-up at The New York Times over its Tom Cotton op-ed, woke culture, Trump superfans, and the empathy gap.


Show Notes:

–The Wokening vs. the Trumpening

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  1. Avatar photo
    Brian Levy

    Great to hear from Declan and Andrew directly. I would love to see Declan's article on life as a conservative at Harvard in 2015 in the show notes to compare to my law school experience. As Steve noted, the campus PC culture is not new, although my undergrad experience at U of I (Illinois) (1982-86) was not nearly as dominated by that as it was at HLS (1986-89).

    Also, Declan, if given the chance, please make sure you copy edit David's choice of the GOAT.

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      Declan Garvey staff-badge Staff

      Any Dispatch product I have final say on will correctly note MJ as the 🐐.

      My dad was U of I '88, and would concur with that. Here's my piece from 2015! https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/3/13/harvard-campus-conservative-criticism/

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    Aylene Wright

    Just FYI everyone, It is Declan Garvey's birthday today! He is now the ripe old age of twenty-six! (A little blue birdie told me ...l

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    1. Sergio C

      Maybe for his birthday, the Dispatch will give him a podcast of his own to host! (or at least I can hope)

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  3. Thomas King

    I think you’re missing the point. In Arlington Cemetery, there is an oak tree and a plaque that was dedicated to the 200 journalists who had fallen covering conflicts that involved US troops. Journalists who claim and op-ed’s words make them unsafe besmirch the memories of these reporters, are not dedicated to the first amendment and should be fired. There is no shortage of brace, able replacements for their positions.

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    Jlenhikes

    Great to hear from Andrew and Declan!

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    Kevin Johnson

    This was good. I enjoyed hearing directly from the youngins, as Steve called them. I was amazed to hear that Declan went right from college to “advising companies”, and then into The Dispatch without journalism experience (if I heard right.). He obviously has some serious chops! Enjoy Andrew’s stuff too. Thanks for explaining the cancel culture on the right, something David elaborates on elsewhere. I would comment, though, that comparing this to the cultural revolution of wokeness is apples and alligators, as Jonah might say. The hounding of conservatives out of campus and the firing of folks for being insufficiently woke started when Trump was still a pro-choice Democrat and has spread to dangerous levels. I am very disappointed in how many on the right have sold their principles for a moment in Trump’s poisonous shadow, but I see a much bigger long-term problem with thought police, words as violence, etc. from the left. Those who still retain credibility need to push back, in my opinion, while also calling out Trumpkins. Thanks again.

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    Adicesa14

    Yes, Trump is symptomatic. By 2016, it seemed there were only voices coming from the ‘woke’ left. He’s President warts, and all because many voters were saying ‘enough!’ That said, to call all of those that voted for Trump supporters is an over-statement. He has supporters plus voters that feel they have no other choice, regardless of his behavior.

    Has the brisket been delivered?

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      Aylene Wright

      Yes, see a pic of him here!
      https://twitter.com/whignewtons/status/1271654633627357189

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  7. Joseph Wellford

    My view of the New York Times hasn’t ever been nearly as reverential as others, so I guess it is odd that I chose to comment on this particular line of discussion. My dad who is a sort of Moderate Conservative, reads the New York Times everyday with breakfast and the Wall Street Journal, when he enjoys his scotch before a late dinner. Like my relationship with the Chicago Cubs, my dad’s relationship with the New York Times was one where he continuously believed that someday it would come to see it his way (win), then he read the damn thing and he’d be disappointed all over again (lose). I get this wasn’t an isolated feeling amongst New York centered conservatives, and that for them this was just one more heart breaking loss in an unbroken series of heart broken losses, but like my friends who moved to other cities and adopted less depression inducing ball clubs, or sports for that matter, I say to those conservatives as my friends said to me, I can see this clearly, the New York Times is always going break your heart.
    A little biographical background will provide some context to my views on Millennials and our younger siblings, I went to one of those well respected Northeastern boarding schools, after high school, rather than joining literally every other member of my graduating class at “College”, I enlisted in the Army. After two years including a year-long, deployment to Afghanistan, my experience convinced me that I wanted a military career, as a Commissioned Officer. So after garnering approval from the powers that be, I matriculated to Stanford, as part of the Class of 2017 and a member of the Army ROTC, which is actually hosted by Santa Clara University.
    As an ROTC Cadet with prior service, I was certainly afforded more respect than most, even amongst the most politically active campus members, largely I believe this is a sort of trickle-down effect of respect that the military had earned among Americans generally (Gallup currently says that approval rate is 79%), plus even the most woke of my classmates still had an odd deference in most cases to authority. Anyway, I think Mr. Eggers made a point during one of his answers about the declining respect for institutions as providing some degree of causality in the recent incidents of institutional capture. As I think about this, my experience tends to provide credence to that notion. Anyway throughout my time at Stanford, I chose to avoid most political discussions, the few times I would engage in debate was when I felt the military was being impugned unfairly or to correct a technical misunderstanding, both usually stemming from civilian ignorance of the military. I did socialize widely on campus, but my core group of friends were veterans and other ROTC students, one of whom I married.
    Stanford had its share of woke warriors, and campus mobs of daily outrage both digital and physical. I would guess my uniform and service made me view their behavior more dismissively, not necessarily with disdain, they seemed childish, sophomoric and more interested in the performative aspects of protest than real reform. I dealt with people from the right and the left, they were inexperienced, idealistic, youthfully arrogant and so was I. It was pretty clear that the highest density of my woke classmates were unsurprisingly not in the science, math and engineering classes. I was an Engineering major, so most of my exposure was in my General Required Course work, so my interactions on the Liberal Arts side of campus were limited I chose to use most my electives to master Chinese (primarily Cantonese and Mandarin), though there was a palpable difference in feeling in those non-language liberal arts classes from my STEM classes, I think that certainly had more to do with faculty. From my perspective, Stanford was very left leaning and definitely very sympathetic to woke sensibilities but I did not get the feeling it had been captured fully by the woke.
    I wanted to make some points about the Times and the millennial migration through the hinterlands bringing wokeness and social justice in their wake.
    I wonder how many Technically based companies, Engineering Firms and Accounting Firms places least populated by Liberal Arts Majors or Social Scientists are impacted by this phenomenon. I suspect that for instance SpaceX isn’t suffering from protests amongst its millennial and younger Engineers concerning its position on Social Justice. Now part of this is that the technical aspects of delivering a payload from a launch pad on the Atlantic Coast of Florida to an earth orbital inclination around 51 degrees is almost exclusively about questions that don’t lend themselves to subjective analysis that is to say these are very nearly pure Engineering and Scientific questions. On the other hand epidemiologists apparently feel they are qualified to discuss the societal value of social justice in comparison to the societal value of mitigation efforts of a Corona Virus (COVID) induced Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic, which I think brings up an interesting point in that the closer your field is to what is called social sciences, which are in the opinion of this Engineer, really just Liberal Arts with numbers. All other similarity to Science is performative rather than operative, its post hoc storytelling and that is decidedly not Science. So I would suggest that the degree of institutional capture is largely relative to the number of Liberal Arts and Liberal Arts adjacent graduates that populate your business and the degree to which the profession is more subjective and objective in nature. Which to go back to the SpaceX example is to say that by subjective I mean built around taste. SpaceX isn’t a taste business, I mean I guess they have a taste for rockets that work, but what to print in your newspaper is almost entirely subjective, and therefore about taste.
    Who was harmed by this episode at the New York Times, I mean maybe the perception of the field of journalism. I genuinely don’t know. This might be why I find it hard to work up a lot of outrage. I find Senator Cotton odious and somehow uncomfortable to watch. I mean it’s hard for me to qualify whether Cotton or the New York Times is actually more obnoxious, so when both of them play the leads in an episode that is a proverbial dumpster fire its hard not to cheer on the fire and not feel sympathy for the dumpster. As for Tom Cotton, he’s almost like the Conservative version of Pete Buttigieg, in the sense that the backstory is a little too perfect. (I mean what self-respecting adult has his mom in an advertisement, its like taking your mother to a job interview.).
    Any way, Senator Cotton, Mr. Trump’s favorite Senator’s, goal was to inspire with this Insurrection Act talk a leftist overreaction. This was transparently an attempt to troll the left and it worked. I mean yes, the Times solicited the piece, but it was a piece about something the Senator already said. In case you’re wondering, I do question the sincerity of Tom Cotton’s belief that the 1st Cavalry Division or 10th Mountain Division would be required to secure America’s cities from several thousands of people engaged in burglary a.k.a looting, arson and vandalism, give me a break. On the other side of this episode, it is amusing that the junior members of the New York Times team yet again exhibit how well they’ve been operantly conditioned by stimulus to behave in precisely the fashion that was desired, though I doubt even Senator Cotton could have imagined how bizarrely the New York Times leadership would behave. I also want to be clear that I don’t think this implies Senator Cotton is a political chess master, this is like the 5-yearold that discovers that if he scratches a certain spot on his dog's back he can make the dog’s rear leg move. Tom Cotton’s action only displays that he, at least has the deductive capacity of a small child. Huzzah Republicans, behold the future of your party! I’ll stop here because discussions of Tom Cotton provoke a level of antipathy in me that I’m uncomfortable with personally.
    Finally, as for the New York Times, it is going to be considerably less interesting, as less and less News is fit to print. As for me I’m not really that worried that journalism takes a hit here, if there is a market for investigative reporting and the Opinion of Senator Tom Cotton I have little doubt that some outlet will emerge to provide those services. I do think that the New York Times is a special case, because it is NOT representative of most employers. I also think that if an employer thinks it is a good idea, to let its entry level employees have a voice in product development (editorial control) then that is up to the employer. I think this may be my way of saying, I can’t tell you how little I care about what the New York Times does and does not choose to print, or for that matter why. I think we’re making way more out of the notion of Institutional capture by the millennials and their younger cohorts than is probably warranted, which by the way is inevitable. We millennials and succeeding generation will capture everything, because you know mortality and stuff. We will bring with us a world view that will differ from our older siblings, parents, and grandparents. In my professional experience there are simply professions that lend themselves more easily to this type of institutional capture, primarily because it isn’t a detriment to the bottom line and I think they might argue that it is beneficial to their bottom line. On the other hand there are a lot of places where that isn’t the case, SpaceX, Ford, Boeing, and Bechtel; these aren’t fields that lend themselves easily to discussions of social justice. In any event show me an a time where Bechtel sacrifices an on-time and on-budget construction project bonus in order to explore systemic racism and we can talk about woke culture moving from the classroom to the office.


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    Dr. Livesey

    I got so angry at Declan Garvey's brief mention of Harvard students attacking another Harvard student with posters denouncing her for simply disagreeing with their own opinions that I've stopped the podcast for a bit to think about that (maybe it comes up in the rest of the podcast, but I want to comment about it now).

    Bad behavior is bad enough, and you have to expect that in just about any group of people, you're going to get some of it. But when we look at some of the most outrageous behavior we've seen in recent years, it seems to have come not just from the direct perpetrators themselves, but from people in authority who knew about it and, it appears, just let it happen.

    The Catholic bishops and child-molesting priests is one example; violent cops and the departments that don't deal with their criminality (the shooting death by the ex-law-enforcement officer's vigilante posse; George Floyd's death in Minneapolis, killed by that cop with so many complaints against him; the Buffalo Police Department, which put out a shameful news release about the 75-year-old who "tripped" but didn't mention that he was pushed).

    So where was the Harvard administration when one of the university's students was being harassed (and that's exactly what was being described) by other students. Who better to enforce some minimum standard of behavior on students? There was probably something that could be easily cited from the student handbook. And this in the era of "safe spaces." Safe space my ass. You know exactly what "safe spaces" are all about when you see people being "canceled" on a campus.

    Harvey Weinstein was his own authority in his organization (although I guess he had partners). In his case, people working around him are said to have helped facilitate his predations.

    Whenever we hear of repeated, similar bad behavior -- anything of an ongoing nature -- I think we should look to aim our real scorn at the authorities in charge of stopping it but who knew about it and didn't, and maybe even the people around the perps who tolerated it. They're at the center of the rot. It's been said that institutional failure is where journalism has some of its most important work to do, but the same applies to law enforcement, legislators and others with oversight in their job descriptions. Nothing makes my blood boil like a person in authority allowing perps to perpetrate. It's just evil, squared. It's the acme of scandal.

    I'll get back to the podcast when my blood stops boiling.

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      Declan Garvey staff-badge Staff

      FWIW, this is the essay in question: https://www.thecrimson.com/column/the-snollygoster/article/2012/11/2/Siskind-affirmative-action/

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        Dr. Livesey

        Thanks. The article is a good argument without being offensive. So the response was to personally attack her.

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      Aylene Wright

      Hopefully you have gotten back to the podcast, but your comments raise a significant question about who exactly is responsible for institutional failure. Is it just the people at the top of the official hierarchy? Or can we argue that if those at the lower echelons band together to exert power, they must also assume responsibility? Does the type of institution make a difference (academic vs. government vs. private businesses like the NYT)? Just some thoughts.

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        Dr. Livesey

        It seems like any institution at all is vulnerable. Some kind of independent oversight seems to be the only thing to keep the rot from taking over. At the top of the Times, there's ultimately only Sulzberger, it seems. When the oversight is concentrated on one person, only personal character -- and I guess wisdom -- watches the watcher.

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  9. Bert Wheeler

    I second Jay’s question. I do not see this podcast nor the latest Remnant in my iTunes feed.

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      BW

      I also don’t have this In my podcast feed. Is this one website only?

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  10. Jay

    Did this get pushed out to iTunes?

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