Progressive professors want a blacklist of Quillette writers

March 17, 2019

This was in response to the following tweet by a Denison University History professor who stated, “And any member of our field who publishes with Quillette should lose all credibility.”

March 16, 2019

One of Thieme’s followers then followed up with the astonishing suggestion that there should be a literal blacklist of academics who have written for the magazine. “It would be nice to have a list of Canadian academics who have published in that shitrag.”

March 17, 2019

Using social pressure to stigmatize is a hallmark of witch hunts throughout history, and this tactic hides in plain sight on social media. But one wonders what the point is of declaring a publication dedicated to free speech and open discourse off limits? It appears that this mob is fearful of what could be gained by engaging in an honest exploration of ideas.

What’s frightening about the ease with which these comments are made is that I highly doubt any of these educators have actually read Quillette.

It has become fashionable to spout nonsense such as Quillette is “racist,” or Quillette is “white supremacist.” When asked to provide evidence, accusers often claim that they do not have to provide evidence, or they just never respond.

There were no responses to these questions. This refusal to provide evidence for accusations is striking considering the number of likes and retweets these dehumanizing statements get on Twitter. So what’s happening here? Let’s explore.

In his article “The Two Step Flow of Communication,” Elihu Katz asks, when it comes to the actions and behaviors of individuals in communities, who is more influential? Opinion leaders or the media?

To set up his investigation he first asks the question, what is an opinion leader? Opinion leaders to Katz express values, have a level of professional expertise in some subject, although it may not be the one they are attempting to influence networks on, and they have large social networks.

For Katz, these opinion leaders are often driven by two things: increasing their status in the eyes of others, and social acceptance.

These opinion leaders are seen as familiar to their networks and are therefore trusted in a way that regular media interlocutors are not.

Applying Katz’s theory to opinion leaders on Twitter, we can see that theory holds. One need only look at the numbers of likes or retweets that opinion leaders like Matthew Sears and aspiring opinion leaders like Katja Thieme receive on Twitter.

In a Washington Post article claiming MAGA hats will eventually be the moral equivalent of Klu Klux Klan robes, Sears spends 95% of his article not even discussing MAGA hats. He espouses on Ancient Greek history, a subject he’s actually knowledgeable in.

However, when it comes time to discuss his initial claim, he makes a very alarming remark: that individual voters should be be held “morally accountable” for the electoral decisions they make. There are a multitude of reasons why this claim is naive and frightening, but I am not going to get into those here.

Sears was surely not thinking of Obama’s drone strikes when he made this assertion. One cannot make such a claim about a system of governance and then just change one’s mind about its authoritarian methods of ruling when a different political leader comes into office. Sears does not seem to understand this.

Sears also makes the assertion that the Covington boys were allowed (if not encouraged) to wear these hats at a March for Life rally and that this serves as a deliberate provocation. First, they should be allowed to wear them, and he has no idea if they were encouraged to do so. That was a strange addition on his part.

Second, that is exactly what a protest is—provoking people who disagree with you. Third, much like a woman choosing to wear a short skirt or a hijab, Sears will have no idea why these boys are wearing MAGA hats until he asks each and every individual boy personally. People contain multitudes.

Sears goes on to say that it is “impossible” to separate the MAGA hate from anti-immigrant and anti-minority values. This is simply not true. People vote for a variety of reasons, often economic or principle-related. They can be wrong about who the best person is to help them economically, but that just means they are wrong, or nostalgic for the well-paid and reliable manufacturing jobs their fathers may have had. It does not necessarily equal racism.

But opinion leaders like Sears, skilled only in Classics, are not experts in these topics. Yet, they continually act as opinion leaders and influence large swaths of people who honestly believe he has done the necessary research himself. Not only influence—Sears is in the business of dehumanization.