The Title IX Regime and the March Through and Beyond the Institutions

New Podcast Just Dropped

A recording of the first episode of my new live podcast hosted on the Callin app is available for streaming on the Internet here.

It’s a 2.5 hour conversation with K.C. Johnson, a Brooklyn College history professor who is the co-author of two important books that trace key episodes in the emergence and growth of the Successor Ideology. I’ll be writing posts on these books later this week but was grateful for the opportunity to talk with its author for the first time and to go in-depth with him about the unusual set of events that set him on a course to become a chronicler of the new progressivism.

Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case is an exemplary case study in the way that progressive dogma can lead the national media on a witch hunt in which elected officials with the power to deprive people of their freedom will enthusiastically participate. That case ended with the Democratic Attorney General of North Carolina unequivocally declaring the accused to be innocent, the prosecutor disbarred for the many egregious acts of misconduct in which he engaged, and a $20 million settlement with Duke University for violating the civil rights of the accused. It also ended with a group of 88 Duke professors who signed a public statement effectively declaring the accused to be guilty by default — if not of the gang rape for which they were falsely accused, then of belonging to the oppressor classes who by virtue of their race and gender enact structural violence on the marginalized — insisting they would never apologize for taking the latter stand, whose validity did not hinge on the truth or falsity of the rape charges.

It wound up being a portent of things to come. In The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities, Johnson and his co-author would go on to describe the model left-wing repressive apparatus that emerged out of the successful attempt to institutionalize the persecutory frenzy of the Duke Rape Case through a principled withdrawal of the rudiments of fair process at every college in America. Informed observers know that the Duke case was a travesty of justice and that there have been dozens of cases in which wrongly punished students have obtained favorable judgments from federal judges. And yet the myths surrounding these institutions march on undeterred by the facts, sustained by the powerful peer pressure exerted by a media in the thrall of an activist agenda.

The interest in these stories is all embedded in the details, which are often at once darkly amusing and frightening in their absurdity. We get a smattering of those details in this long conversation, but also a portrait of a figure inadvertently caught up in the culture wars — one who was widely seen as among the most accomplished young historians in America, who wound up choosing to serve as witness to the sudden metastasis of a strange and ongoing ideological coup whose end is nowhere in sight. His comments on these subjects are invariably incisive and humane.

Callin is at the moment an iPhone only app but will soon be released on Android. If you want to be present at a future live recording, you will have to download the app, but future episodes will all be available for listening in a browser. Callin is similar in its functionality to Clubhouse with the crucial difference that all the rooms are recorded by default and live permanently on the Internet. Participating in the conversation is always free. I hope you’ll download and follow me on the app.