J.R. Clarke

Hierarchical individualist male

[Jacob Shell @JacobAShell]

Though I'd sensed something was off for years prior, COVID was the first time I realized academia had been completely leveraged as an epistemic support system for one party. If there's a crisis and the choice is between sticking to previously stated theoretical principles, versus serving the party, academics will serve the party.

For example: there was a very obvious "Latourian" way to analyze the whole saga of COVID, emphasizing runaway incentive dynamics in the grant system as a way to understand the disease origins; intra-institutional political-jockeying among different scientists as a way to understand why some "finding" about origin, spread, treatment, and relationship to other social problems became Settled Truth one month and Debunked Pseudo-Science the next; what to make of masking as public health policy vs sociopolitical performance; what to make of "biopolitical" revolts like the Canadian truckers...

Well, despite Latour being one of the hottest names to cite in the humanities and social sciences during the 90s, 00s and 10s, academics--including the the ones who'd built their whole careers as "Latourians"--weren't doing *any* of that! Basically they were just nervously hitting "refresh" on the NYT main page to tell them what COVID opinion this month would make them "members in good standing" of the party coalition, and then attaching their authority ("as academic experts") to that opinion. Academics were downstream of the NYT and the NYT was downstream of DNC deliberations about what side of highly contentious and ambiguous debates regarding masking, flight cancellations, lockdowns, vaccines, origins, protests and rioting, etc etc, to get on in order to best position itself against Trump. Nobody was really supposed to say anything that wasn't implicitly useful for Biden.

The doubly servile partisan role academics were being asked to play--and the eagerness with which most embraced this role--was shocking to me.

And the consequences have outlived the crisis. It REMAINS the case that academics cannot write an insightful account (historical, sociological, etc) of COVID. It's 2026, and it remains the case that *even* having to acknowledge in published writing that there's a very good chance the disease came from lab (with support from a US grant) completely scares almost all qualified academics away from writing about the topic. And how can you write about COVID "as history" or "as sociology" if you're scared to discuss origin?

[County Highway @countyhwy]

People laugh when we suggest that there is an alternative to living in dying mega-cities like Los Angeles and New York. In their minds, living in “the city” is an important lifestyle accomplishment that makes them kin with the Velvet Underground and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In reality, of course, what makes artists special is that they create art — which is impossible when you are paying $3500 a month for a share in a fake loft and drinking $7 lattes.

Artists lived in cities because they were cheap. Actual artists can’t afford to live in today’s mega-cities which are game reserves for trust fund NGO workers, the very rich and the immigrant poor. Not exactly fertile ground for real art — which is one reason why there is so little of it these days. You’ll have better luck in any decent town with cheap rent and a record store.

[Matt Ridley @mattwridley]

Now you know why that collapse happened:

Here's torrent of foul-mouthed, childish ranting by scientific experts as they said in private the very same things they criticised in public, and stood by an influential article they knew to be badly wrong.

https://t.co/dKwx4AfImE

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

I recommend you steel yourself and read the whole thing. You need to know. Trigger warning or something.
https://t.co/pUR0jYndtM

[Brandon Warmke @BrandonWarmke]

No one discriminates against conservatives.

Of course we discriminate, they’re stupid.

Actually universities are very conservative and full of conservative administrators.

Every idea will be tried, every piece of evidence will be ignored, before admitting a critic is right.

[RE-OPEN THE SIZZLERS @SaladBarFan]

I don’t actually care about “viewpoint diversity” so much as I think a lot of academics just say and hold empirically false beliefs and waste taxpayer funds by engaging in an extremist political project instead of actually expanding human knowledge and understanding.

[Adrian Vermeule @Vermeullarmine]

But I don’t want to lose the most amusing sub-genre of tweets: academics explaining that there really isn’t any ideological bias in academic hiring — it’s just that everyone who disagrees with them is both stupid and wicked.

[PoIiMath @politicalmath]

This is part of the reason we have to keep talking about it: Because many people keep lying about it.

There was plenty of enacted censorship. Netflix pulled an episode of Community from streaming. The company that prints 30 Rock physical media quietly removed several episodes from the DVD and Blu-Rays prints. Six Dr Seuss books were discontinued, pulled from bookstore shelves, and banned from 3rd party sales on eBay and Amazon.

Now, near as I can tell, most of the censorship has been undone. The offending Community and 30 Rock episodes are available on streaming again. You are finally allowed to sell your copy of "On Beyond Zebra" on eBay.

But there has not really been any reckoning for any of this. There is no institutional infrastructure to keep it from happening again. People like @gabewildau put forth the standard left-wing line, which is "It was mildly embarrassing, also you're exaggerating what happened, stop talking about it."

I don't see why we should stop talking about it when the left is still flogging the idea that taking a book with pornographic images out of an elementary school library is a "book ban"

[John McWhorter @JohnHMcWhorter]

https://t.co/hPhVjYPNHw

Good God. Rouse genuinely thinks Fighting the Power is the essence of serious thinking, has never been questioned about it even this far into her career, and is incapable of even understanding what Lee's questions are getting at. She's not deflecting. She really has no idea how ridiculous she sounds.

I became an academic out of being curious about things. Gradually realizing since the 1990s that this kind of person is ordinary in the humanities and social sciences, is routinely given awards and high administrative positions, and is beyond the reach of rational discussion has been one of the most disappointing experiences of my life.

[Natalya Murakhver @AppletoZucchini]

🔥 I knew this would happen. I just didn't know how fast.

We premiered #15DAYS last October at the @Moms4Liberty summit and it has not stopped. Over 1M views in its limited @X run. Sold out screenings. Parents crying in the audience. Teachers, @TPUSA students coming up to me afterward saying thank you, finally someone told the truth.

NYC. Los Gatos. Grand Junction. Paso Robles. Bucks County. Austin. Burlington. Buffalo. And we are just getting started.

I made this film because I lived it. I'm a Soviet immigrant who came to this country at 6 believing America would never do what the Soviet Union did to its people. Then I watched them lock our kids out of our public schools, while the privates stayed open. I watched @BilldeBlasio tell parents to shut up & comply. I filed the only lawsuit against NYC to reopen schools. I co-founded @Rstorechildhood when nobody would listen.

And then we went on the road and started filming. Back in 2022.

15 DAYS tells the real story of what happened to America's children during the pandemic school closures. Not the political spin. Not the media narrative. The truth. What we did to kids. What we did to families.

This film is not going away. We are not going away. Every screening fills up because parents across the country are still angry and deserve to be.

Next month marks 6 years since the closures. There is still no reckoning, no accountability.

Streaming is coming soon. But right now we are bringing this film to cities across America because this story deserves to be seen together in a room full of people who lived through it.

🎬 Watch the trailer below. If you want a screening in your city go to https://t.co/kylcO3VPAc. If you've already seen it share this and tell someone.

They are still trying to memory hole what they did to our kids. We won't let them.

[Kat Rosenfield @katrosenfield]

Down a rabbit hole, stumbled on this 2020 op-ed from an Oscar-winning writer calling for Gone With the Wind to be banned from HBO

I know some of you want this moment memory holed because it's embarrassing, but I just don't think we can or should ever, ever stop talking about it

[J.R. Clarke @J_R_Clarke]

I’m shocked:

[Julian Assange @ImJulianAssange]

Trudeau Government Used Faked Intelligence To Illegally Frame Protesting Truckers As Violent Extremists
https://t.co/7vazS6m525

[Brandon Warmke @BrandonWarmke]

At what point are the epistemic practices so bad, the epistemic vices so widespread and thoroughly installed at the highest levels of prestige that an academic discipline is actually anti-reliable when it comes to tracking the truth? Asking not just for anthropology.

[J.R. Clarke @J_R_Clarke]

…and if you are the parent of small children, that commute is often the only uninterrupted time you’ll get all day.

I know that I cherished my commute, and I’m certain I’m not the only one.

[wanye @xwanyex]

Thinking more about what people get wrong about suburbs and I think it basically amounts to a refusal to take the automobile seriously as a comfortable and effective mode of transportation

“I bet you hate that long commute”

No, because the automobile is a comfortable and effective mode of transportation.

“You must feel lonely and isolated out there”

No, because the automobile is a comfortable and effective mode of transportation.

[J.R. Clarke @J_R_Clarke]

Progressive groupthink is absolutely impenetrable:

[Meghan Daum @meghan_daum]

What every fool cries out on the way to the gulag: "If I just explain it, they'll understand!"

[Preston Byrne @prestonjbyrne]

Hi, I'm their lawyer. It will be a cold day in Hell before my client pays that fine. Ofcom won't be collecting it unless they're prepared to land ground troops in America, overthrow our government, and rescind our constitutional order by force.

Hope that helps!

[wanye @xwanyex]

We have kept our tenant below market rate the entire time she’s lived in our unit and worked with her when she couldn’t pay last year after a job loss that kept her behind for multiple months.

If Providence city council passes a rent stabilization bill that says that I am locked forever into that lower baseline rent, whereas somebody else who has maximized profits all along gets to start from that higher baseline, then it’s going to turn me into the fucking joker, I swear.

[Megan McArdle @asymmetricinfo]

People in NYC used to say that Trump was "a poor person's idea of a rich person"--which was supposed to be a dunk and actually described his political appeal. Dems trying to tap that same populist energy instead selected a rich person's idea of a poor person.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

🇬🇧 THEY TOLD YOU A STORY. 🇬🇧

Colonisers. Slavers. Oppressors. And you were supposed to feel ashamed.

Not for what you done... But for WHO YOU ARE. 🇬🇧

So we tested it. Britain wrote everything down, so we opened the books. 📖

Turns out fewer than 1 man in 10 could vote in the year Britain banned the slave trade. No woman could. Your ancestors could hang for stealing a sheep, get shipped across the world for petty theft, or go down a mine at 8 years old. In Manchester, the average age of death in a labouring family was 17.

They weren't running the slave trade. They were underneath it too.

Which is what makes what happened next worth knowing.

In 1772 an enslaved man named James Somerset walked free from an English court, because English law couldn't hold a slave.

In 1791, 300,000 families just stopped buying slave sugar. No march, no riot, just a decision made at 300,000 kitchen tables.

In 1792, 519 petitions carrying 390,000 names hit Parliament, most signed by people who couldn't vote themselves.

In 1807, Britain banned the trade.

Then the slave owners sent Britain a bill for the 800,000 people they still held. 💷 £20 million. About 40% of the entire government budget at the time.

The Treasury says it wasn't paid off until 2015. So if your family paid British tax before then, they helped buy 800,000 people their freedom.

From 1808 the Royal Navy spent 60 years hunting slave ships at sea: 1,600 stopped, 150,000 people freed, and 1,600 British sailors dead, mostly of disease, buried thousands of miles from home. ⚓

In 1816 they ended two centuries of Barbary corsairs enslaving Europeans.

In 1896 a war that lasted 38 minutes ended slavery in Zanzibar. 🇹🇿

Almost every country on Earth outlaws slavery today.

That fight was paid for largely at British expense, by British hands.🇬🇧

So why haven't you heard any of this?

Because within living memory, someone rewrote the story. You got taught the crime. Not the cure.

The powerful exploited the world. They exploited their own people first. It was those people who ended slavery. 🇬🇧

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

History got rewritten once, in living memory, by no one who was ever named or held to account.

We are ordinary people doing what ordinary people have always done. Opening the books. Refusing to look away.

This is how we fight back. Fact by fact. Story by story. Name by name.

We are the home of British heroes. There is a place for you in it.

If you can afford to support what we do: https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧 Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[J.R. Clarke @J_R_Clarke]

Finally, a legal scholar for the people:

[Three Year Letterman @3YearLetterman]

🚨 BRAKING LEGAL ANALYSIS 🚨

I have spent the last 24 hours in scholarly research and in prayer over the Supreme Court’s birthmark citizenship ruling yesterday. Here are the legal facts from my perspective as a licensed notary public and countywide justice of the piece:

1. Before yesterday, birthmark citizenship was illegal. This ruling ushers in a new era where, if someone has ever been on US soil, legally or not, and they later give birth, the child is a US citizen

2. This decision is stare decisis (Latin for “decided forever”) and therefore cannot be overturned by a later court or by constitutional amendment

3. The decision can be overturned by legislative action or executive order

4. However, even if birthmark citizenship is reversed, it CANNOT apply retroactively. That means that it cannot apply to anyone who is alive before the decision is overturned if they later give birth. Thus, anyone alive today confers birthmark citizenship when they give birth, regardless of whether the decision is overturned

5. With Justice Elito’s confirmed retirement, the decision cannot be revisited because that can only be done if the court’s members don’t change