For many of you, Wilfred Reilly needs no introduction. He is a political scientist at Kentucky State University. He has three highly successful “crossover” books (appealing to both academic and popular audiences): Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me, Hate Crime Hoax, and Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About. His public essays have titles like Left-Wing Antisemitism is Just the Tip of the Iceberg and Western Civilization and Other Things I Like about White People. He has over 100,000 followers on X, where you can find takes that combine cultural commentary, data, and calling bullshit on all sorts of nonsense on social media, with a healthy dose of humor on the side.
Wilfred was the keynote speaker at the 2024 SOIBS conference. This is based on his presentation. Wilfred’s essay refers to this as the “Speakeasy” because that is the in-house nickname for these conferences, capturing the fact that SOIBS embraces what might be illicit discourse in other academic venues (such as debating the [de]merits of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).
On Seeking Truth
The theme of my speech at the most recent Behavioral and Social Sciences Speakeasy was that almost all human beings possess a guiding set of heuristics, if not a guiding faith tradition, but that empirically minded scholars should avoid or control this tendency as much as possible.
On the contemporary political left, for example, we have witnessed an extraordinary recent level of tolerance for frank Jew-baiting. At Harvard University, an open letter signed by 34 prominent student organizations laid all blame for the rape-murders of 7 October on Jewish ‘settler colonialism” in the Middle East. At New York’s Cooper Union University, Jewish students were apparently locked in a small library for 20 minutes by radical students chanting “Free Palestine.” In Sydney (AU), across the water, the chant from a crowd made up largely of leftist university students was quite literally “Gas the Jew(s)!!!”
While deeply offensive, this gels with a great deal of crazy talk recently directed at other out-groups by leftist academics and public intellectuals. Prominent academic figure “Professor Crunk” – aka Rutgers University Chair-holder Brittney Cooper – recently gave a televised talk where she referred to whites as “these motherfuckers” and suggested members of other races might need to “take them out.[1]” Blacks conservatives can get it too: the Los Angeles Times, newspaper of record for a state, repeatedly referred to my friend Larry Elder as “The Black Face of White Supremacy” during his run for Golden State Governor. “TERFS” and other heterodox women – actual radical feminists, “trad-wives,” etc – are not immune: “Let Women Speak” events have been ended by trans activist protesters, with women shoved to the ground and doused with paint or juice. Even Westerners in general are now sometimes criticized en bloc: the “decolonization” movement has become a feature of most properly hip campuses, with Indian land acknowledgements read aloud before events and North America referred to as (say) Turtle Island.
Notably, however, activist abuse of Jews AND whites AND Black business-people AND “settlers” contrasts sharply with a total refusal to hear any criticism whatsoever of Sacred Cow groups. For example, Harvard – she of the 34-signatory letter, who refused along with Penn and MIT to say whether calling for a 2nd Holocaust constitutes “hate speech” – simultaneously has a campus-wide policy against any “mis-gendering” of people who identify as transgender. Speakers like Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopolous not infrequently touch off near- riots at similar institutions, while both Bill Kristol and Ann Coulter have been splattered with pies Three Stooges-style.
Bans on gender HERESY and mainstream conservative speech are just two of many taboos. Per a recent PNAS paper lead-authored by Cory Clark – with contributors including both Lee and myself – other sentiments that are currently verboten on the academic center-left (all slightly paraphrased here) include: “Biological sex is binary, meaningful, and easily identifiable;” “Racial, etc. diversity can lead to worse performance for teams;” “There may be genetic racial or national/population differences in IQ;” and “Racism is not the primary cause of higher Black crime rates, or of many similar racial group gaps.”
At the most recent Speakeasy, I argued that all of these tap’ui spring from a single belief system which we might call Woke Blank Slatism (WBS). Simplified only a bit – it wasn’t rocket surgery to start with – WBS has three prongs: (1) facially neutral systems within society (think academic testing or incarceration) are in fact intentionally designed to oppress minorities/the poor; (2) all performance gaps between groups indicate some such form of oppression; and (3) the solution to any under-representation is equity – or proportional representation of all groups in every environment, regardless of performance. All of this is often said quite openly: early on in his first best-selling book, Dr. Ibram Kendi argues that the only possible reasons for any Black/white gap or similar racial gap are racism in some form or presumably genetic “inferiority” – “there’s something wrong with Black people.”
At some level, the claims of WBS advocates are…how to say this politely (?)…very very obviously not true. While individual racism clearly exists, modern American society simply is not set up to hold down “POC.” Racial (and sex) discrimination has been civilly, and often criminally, illegal since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Pro-minority affirmative action has itself been the law of the land for 57 years, if we date from Mr. Nixon’s Philadelphia Plan in 1967. Partly as a result, either seven or eight of the ten richest ethnic groups in the USA – depending on how one chooses to classify South Africans – are of Asian or African extraction. The best-educated group in the country seems to be Nigerians, who hail from West Africa.
And so on. As serious economists have noted for decades, even lingering gaps between white and Black Americans (and between men and women) close to almost nothing if we adjust for very basic factor variables like age – the modal average age for a Black American is 27, as versus 58 for a white American – region of residence, and tested IQ as measured by different sections of board tests. But, many people believe the WBS set of heuristics, accurate or not, and this explains the dichotomy between the frenzied attacks we see against some groups and the refusal of contemporary academia and media to even criticize others.
Similar heuristic frames obviously exist on the right side of the political spectrum: a popular one today could perhaps be called Hard Trad Preference. A substantial percentage of conservatives openly want to move the Overton Window for acceptable verbal exchange back toward where it used to be decades ago: 40-41% still believe that the world is roughly 5,000 years old, and many want to ban or radically limit pornography, medical surrogacy, gay marriage, and even the franchise for women. The most extreme and “based” alternative to WBS might well be, to many academics and businesswomen who are heartily sick of The Woke by now, even less appealing.
In one sentence: scholars should reject all set quasi-religious frameworks of this kind. Almost all adult citizens have individual honor codes and the like, but to the greatest extent possible – while doing research – we should have no starting/guiding heuristics…or at very least try to limit any which we are aware of and may be stuck with. Our only goal should be to follow the data where it leads, seek the pure truth, and find it.
[1] Cooper hardly speaks and writes alone, on this topic. A cookies-off Google search for the phrase “the real problem is white men” currently turns up 2,140,000,000 mostly-on-point results.
The Brittney Cooper “incident” was three years ago. Not sure why Wilfred that it was pertinent to our current environment? Seemed more like he was just trying to justify his WBS model. As the Spanish would say - que tonterias!