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Monday, April 8, 2019

The IDW and the Fox News Narrative

The picture Weinstein tweeted, implying these
students were "roaming the campus."
Last summer Noah Berlatsky wrote a piece for Pacific Standard that presented a different take on the Bret Weinstein/Heather Heying martyr narrative from the one so beloved by the Right.

It's important to note that Weinstein and Heying received $500K in a settlement with Evergreen College and now seem to be working full time as members of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Bret Weinstein Wiki

Following his resignation from Evergreen, Weinstein has been described as being part of the "Intellectual Dark Web", a term which his brother Eric coined to describe a group of academics and media personalities who publish outside of mainstream media.

Heather Heying web site
I will gladly spend hours watching parrots klatsch at a clay lick, lizards hunt katydids, and squirrel monkeys do anything. I enjoy wandering around foreign cities. I enjoy wandering around natural places even more–the Washington coast in Spring during the shorebird migration, neotropical cloud forests with squirrel cuckoos and colorful bursts of tanagers, the San Juan Islands, the Amazon.

Berlatsky wrote:
...Though Weinstein calls himself a progressive, he went on the rabidly right-wing, anti-immigrant Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News shortly after the protests. Carlson claimed that white people had been forced off campus, which was not true. He then played a clip of the protest, framing it to suggest, falsely, that the protest had been a response to Weinstein's email alone. Weinstein co-signed that version of events, and did not correct Carlson when he said that the core demand of the protesters was that white people leave campus—which, again, was completely false. Participation in the Day of Absence was voluntary, and student demands did not include any discussion of forcing students off campus. 
Weinstein's appearance on Carlson alerted the far right to the anti-racist protests at Evergreen, unleashing a flood of hate mail and a credible far-right terrorist threat that led to administrators evacuating the campus for three days in June. The school had to move the location of graduation.
Weinstein also tweeted a picture of college students who he claimed were involved in violence. For example, he claimed that students with bats were roaming campus, and used as evidence a clearly staged photo, unlinked to the protests, with no evidence that the students pictured were involved in any violence. The fallout for these students was intense. One student, who asked to remain anonymous to protect their safety, said that they started receiving death threats from people who knew their address. "I had to move three times for my safety and eventually left the state," the student says. Later, the student was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of the constant threats. "I feel incredibly isolated, like no one could understand or even wants to take the time to understand what really happened," the student says. "The narrative surrounding our goals and actions has been so horribly skewed, I don't know how to begin addressing it."*
So it sounds like the only ones who did well by the controversy were Weinstein and Heying.


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