I laughed and laughed at the pretentious yet oafish, resentment-driven nitwits at the university funded by fascists and techno-fascists, described in the New Inquiry's article An American Education: Notes from UATX.
But at least it contains confirmation that the "Intellectual Dark Web" has always been about techno-fascism and a "natural aristocracy." Techno-fascists Joe Lonsdale and Marc Andreessen are featured:
For all of UATX’s supposed concern about “the culture,” the soul, the ethic of America, what at last constituted its core was this limitless faith in the goodness of the free market and entrepreneurship, of accumulating capital by endlessly making new products. Integral to this faith was a conviction about who merited such wealth and the political power that accompanied it. This who came into focus toward the close of the entrepreneurs’ talk. “There’s something very scary in our society—where this idea of a natural aristocracy,” Lonsdale said at the end, “has like really fallen out of favor.” Here it was, for a flash unconcealed by euphemism: “a natural aristocracy.”
At some level, Lonsdale—who displays the verbal intelligence of an 18-year old fratboy and who, moments later, would declare that when founding a company “you want whatever unfair advantages you can get”—doesn’t care about “natural” ability. What the author of tweets claiming “average black culture” is “broken” cares about is justifying existing economic and racial inequality and those, like himself and Andreessen, who reap massive rewards from it.
By the way, Andreessen and Lonsdale are not unlikely to reap some financial rewards from their very participation in UATX. Consider it. Andreessen and Lonsdale champion AI at UATX. Two weeks later, Bari Weiss publishes an article by Andreessen in The Free Press, “AI Will Save the World.” Wait another week or so. UATX then uploads a video recording of the Andreessen-Lonsdale talk, titling it, “Will AI Save the World?” Lonsdale posts the same video to his YouTube channel, where it gets almost 45k views, and tweets a clip from it, which gets over 700k. The upshot: a billionaire and a millionaire whose VC firms have a tremendous financial stake in AI get to widely broadcast the value of their securities. In the grand scheme of business strategy, this chain of events may be minor, but it represents just one of the many channels through which UATX’s founders and friends reinforce their wealth and influence.
But Peter Boghossian was there to provide laughs:
It happened to be Father’s Day, so when Peter (Boghossian), in between lauding UATX’s rigorous admission standards, mentioned a son, I wished him a happy one.
“Oh thanks,” he said. “I got jack and shit.” Muzak dribbled out of the hotel sound system.
“Shuttle’s here!” Loren Rotner, Assistant Chief Academic Officer, soon said, looking up from his phone. We all stood.
Peter sat next to me on the bus. He was fired up. He was delivering opening remarks later that night, plus we’d begun talking about a subject that interested him: exercise. “It’s indispensable for an intellectual,” he told me. “You should be exercising. Do you?”
I’d recently started going to the gym, I said. He looked doubtful.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.
It should be noted that Boghossian is pushing 60. What an absolutely pathetic loser he-man wanna-be.
Boghossian shows up a little later...
Pano Kanelos, president, stood up. It was time for the opening remarks. Our chatter lulled, and he began to speak in gentle, benevolent tones. He told us that we weren’t starting a university; we were a university. This is what a university looks like: people coming together for conversations, much like the ones we’d been having over our complimentary chicken dinners. “Dia-logue,” he said. “From the Greek, logos.” Two rational beings, engaged in rational discourse. He smiled. We smiled. And with little further ado, he introduced Peter, whom the other students had not yet had the good fortune of meeting. Peter, Pano told us, was “kicking butt in the righteous name of freedom.”
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”
What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.
He turns his back to the audience, hunches slightly and strides, stroking his chin. He is Rodin’s thinker set in manic motion; he is a relentless logician in his study at midnight; he is a frantically philosophical gremlin … —BAM! He wheels around and stalks forward and slings his index finger out toward a student, demands of him whether climate change is real?! and how certain is he?! and why?!—BOP! He points at another student, asks whether gender is a social construct, whether trans women are women?! He cites Socrates and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. He staggers and weaves: as a boxer dances, so Peter lectures. He is the professor you never had; he is a squall of raw intellect; he is Robin Williams in the Dead Poets Society, but ripped. He is putting a gun to the head of your most precious assumptions.
Oh man, if you created a character like that in a play, nobody would buy it.
Seth Dillon, the sociopath who funds the psychopath Chaya Raichik of LibsofTikTok was perfectly described:
Up next, Mr. Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, or “the Onion for evangelicals,” as New Yorker writer Kalefa Sanneh has nicely put it. (They have headlines like, “Man Caught Drinking Bud Light Insists He’s Not Gay.”) Dillon spoke about “Canceling Comedy” the evening of the second day. Scoffing at opposition to “punching down” in comedy, he raised his eyebrows and leered and smirked. He demonstrated an impressive command of alliteration: “Nothing,” he said, “undercuts lunacy and lies like laughter.” He licked Mr. Elon Musk’s boots, exclaiming that “the world’s richest man took matters into his own hands,” bought Twitter, “and declared comedy legal again.” In his beard and suit, he was a spectacular manchild.
It's so hard to decide who is more repulsive, Dillon or Boghossian. But wait, here comes Rob Henderson and Richard Hanania!
Unlike most of the previous speakers, he was not alone on stage but sat facing UATX professor Rob Henderson. This gave some unsuspecting students the impression that the two might argue. Perhaps Henderson and Hanania disagreed about something. Perhaps the “constructive debate” advertised by UATX’s website was imminent. As if conscious of this expectation, Henderson put on a funny little voice and asked Hanania if he could define the word “woke,” cleverly saying, “I think being woke just means you’re a good person.…” Hanania obliged Henderson, providing his personal genealogy of the term, before launching into a frantic invective against Affirmative Action and DEI. Following some warped line of thought whose only logic was that of racism, Hanania burst out that he’d “rather punish people for something they have no control over—the color of their skin” than because “their parents run around smoking crack!”
Other obnoxious freaks who get shout-outs include Katie Roiphe, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Jordan Peterson, Dorian "I hate feminism!" Abbot, and the queen bee of sleazy, sugar-daddy-handout hypocrisy herself, Bari Weiss.
Oh and does "liberal" Steven Pinker still subscribe to Richard Hanania on Twitter/X?
You bet he does.
