Mike

Free Speech, Natural Rights and Mahmoud Khalil

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Some thoughts regarding Mahmoud Khalil, the Green Card holder who is currently being held in detention by the Trump administration pending deportation.

First, Laughing Wolf wrote about Khalil being a planned op. I have similar thoughts that this was fishy given the way the various pieces fit together, and will note my suspicions at the end.

Given that the Khalil affair deals with free speech and citizenship, it applies pressure across several points within not only Trump’s coalition but his larger base of support in the country. Trump drew on a lot of defections from Democrats, Tech, and others regarding threats to civil liberties. Now you sense a hesitancy among some of his supporters.

Khalil’s case actually has two dimensions, freedom of speech and the status of citizenship in a society with accordant rights and responsibilities.

The American concept of “freedom of speech” is held to be a sacred right, though mostly in a confused way since it is viewed mostly as a constitutional right and almost exclusively as a process.

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The Final Four of Villainy

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Two threads….

The first is that through the years I have, without quite realizing it, become a student of political anthropology. Much like an intrepid explorer in the depths of the Amazon, observing the strange rituals of local tribesmen, I observe the strange rituals and habits of the Left and their various auxiliaries.

Right now the media is playing its “French Resistance” card. No, I don’t mean by being brave and fighting the “Orange Hitler” as if it was 1942. I’m talking about finally coming out, after years of kissing up to the Left, and “breaking” stories as if they were mythical (and I’m quite serious about mythical) Woodwards and Bernsteins. Of course anybody who has connected the dots in a pre-K coloring book already figured out those stories years ago.

Take Jake Tapper, who is doing his star turn as the 21st Century equivalent of the local Gestapo officer’s girlfriend, who has decided to greet Patton by yelling “Vive De Gaulle!” In his upcoming book, Original Sin, Tapper will reveal to the world the untold story that… Biden wasn’t in the best mental shape. Sacre bleu!

This month we are observing the five-year anniversary of the COVID lockdowns, and just as impressively the media has come to life, revealing to the world things that we figured out… well, five years ago. That COVID leaked from a lab, that the lockdown policies were a 180-degree turn in long-established policy, and that it all stunk to high heaven.

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Incentives Matter

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Coyote Blog describes in the interconnection between incentives and results:

“Here is Coyote’s first law of incentives: There are always incentives. If they are not embodied in written performance metrics, then there are unwritten ones that rule behaviors. And these unwritten incentives are generally a) very powerful and b) almost never aligned with the greater organization’s goals.”

Coyote goes on:

“But in general, government employees operate in a vacuum without any positive metrics — they can’t prove themselves by meeting or exceeding this or that goal because the goals have not been assigned and are not measured. So the default metric becomes this: to avoid screwing up.

Government employees operate in a web of hundreds, even thousands of procedural rules.”

This has been a theme of his for years, incentives drive behavior which is Psychology 101. I have long argued, back to my academic days, that the utility rational actor theory was not a predictive tool regarding individual behavior but rather an analytical tool to discern the underlying incentive structure in an organization.

The incentive structure for public employees is built around risk aversion, not just because of the lack of performance metrics, but also because if you’re a public employee the last thing you want is an elected official or a lawyered-up member of the public coming after you. You also never want to be “above the fold” of a media story.

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What Does Higher Ed Stand For?

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Deborah Lipstadt writes:

My decision to withdraw my name from consideration for a teaching post at Columbia is based on three calculations.

First, I am not convinced that the university is serious about taking the necessary and difficult measures that would create an atmosphere that allows for true inquiry.

Second, I fear that my presence would be used as a sop to convince the outside world that “Yes, we in the Columbia/Barnard orbit are fighting antisemitism. We even brought in the former Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism.” I will not be used to provide cover for a completely unacceptable situation.

Third, I am not sure that I would be safe or even able to teach without being harassed. I do not flinch in the face of threats. But this is not a healthy or acceptable learning environment.

This is an article that has been making the rounds over the last few days and no wonder: it is a passionate diatribe against Columbia/Barnard’s tolerance of intolerance regarding free inquiry and antisemitism.

So I’ll make a couple of points.

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The Long Haul of Woke

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I came across this essay by N.S. Lyons and it took me a minute to realize that it was a reprint from three years ago on his Substack. Yet after all that time and all that has happened (and is happening) it remains as timely as ever.

Why?

As Lyons writes in his editor’s note to the reprint:

Today, with the second Trump administration in power, we have seen a sledgehammer taken to those DEI programs, as well as other manifestations of wokeness such as transgender mania. Again, many observers are pronouncing the demise of the revolution. It is always dangerous to declare victory prematurely, while the enemy can yet strike back.

 

Much, it is true, has changed; but much remains the same. The original essay lists twenty different reasons to be skeptical of the sudden demise of wokeness. Of those, several, including the observation that woke racial bookkeeping was effectively required by law (#15), that it maintained control of all the levers of power within government (#19), and that government was intent on leveraging the ideology to expand its bureaucratic power (#20), have perhaps now been largely overturned. But others, such as the observation that wokeness functions as a pseudo-religion that fills a spiritual and communal void in our culture, or that the “overproduction” of college-educated elites makes our society particularly susceptible to radicalization, seem as relevant as ever.

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