Facts vs. feelings: “Sarah Jeong’s tweets and blog posts are just a marker of the world we already live in”…
…writes Heather Mac Donald in National Review. Mac Donald also points out that Jeong holds opinions on white people that are typical of what passes for thought in academia these days. They are not unusual at all:
…[Jeong’s] tweets are not imitative of anything other than the ideology that now rules the higher-education establishment, including UC Berkeley and Harvard Law School, both of which Jeong attended. And that ideology is taking over non-academic institutions, whether in journalism, publishing, the tech sector, or the rest of corporate America. Sarah Jeong’s tweets and blog posts are just a marker of the world we already live in.
The key features of Jeong’s worldview are an obsession with whiteness and its alleged sins; a commitment to the claim that we live in a rape culture; and a sneering contempt for objectivity and truth-seeking. These are central tenets of academic victimology. From the moment freshmen arrive on a college campus, they are inundated by the message that they are either the bearers of white privilege or its victims. College presidents and the metastasizing diversity bureaucracy teach students to see racism where none exists, preposterously accusing their own institutions of systemic bias.
It’s all “whiteness studies” all the time now. That’s hyperbole, of course, but not by all that much.
Mac Donald discusses something else that I haven’t seen talked about much before in regard to Jeong’s oeuvre:
Jeong’s magnum opus of academic victimology is a long 2014 blog post on the Rolling Stone campus-rape hoax. Written after the Rolling Stone had retracted its sensational and wholly fictional story on a gruesome fraternity rape at the University of Virginia, Jeong’s post tortuously and often incoherently explains why it is imperative to continue believing the pseudo-victim, Jackie. The effort to discredit the Rolling Stone story (a process otherwise known as belated fact-checking) represents the patriarchy’s campaign to deny the existence of rape culture, she writes.
The credo of the campus rape movement is: “Believe unconditionally,” as New York University’s Wellness Exchange puts it. Jeong takes that credo to heart. “The more I see these ‘inconsistencies’ and ‘discrepancies’ [in the Rolling Stone story] touted as evidence of falsehood, the more convinced I am that Jackie is not lying,” Jeong writes. She sneers at such “mundanities” as dates and times that refute Jackie’s narrative, a remarkable stance, one might think, for a journalist.
Not to mention a journalist for the NY Times. That’s a bit of sarcasm on my part, because unfortunately the Times has a history of ignoring (that’s a kind word for it) a great many inconvenient facts, if said facts refute their narrative.
Jeong will fit right in. I cannot imagine that the people at the Times who hired her didn’t see a long blog post of hers, if that post is still up there.
After I wrote that, I decided to try a little harder to find it. It’s been deleted, but someone archived it here, so you can read it if you’re interested. I was interested. Jeong’s basic point is that she believes Jackie on some gut level despite everything; and that gut feelings like hers trump evidence (she doesn’t deal with the evidence that Jackie had fabricated her own cellphone texts from a fictional boyfriend and invented the rape to make a guy she had a crush on jealous, but in all fairness to Jeong, when she wrote that article I don’t think those facts had yet been revealed, although plenty else had been revealed to discredit Jackie’s claims).
The sad thing is that belief in guts over evidence is by no means an idiosyncrasy of Jeong’s. As Mac Donald correctly points out, it’s rampant in academia and is not at all unusual in journalism. But one of the things in Jeong’s essay that especially caught my attention was this statement (recall as you read it that Jeong is a graduate of Harvard Law):
In law school, after all, we learned that due process is what we get in lieu of justice. And what’s due process besides a series of rules that are meant to keep things as predictable as fucking possible?
Ah, so that’s what they’re teaching at Harvard Law these days. When I was in law school—in the Dark Ages—we learned that due process is a series of rules meant to get as close to achieving actual justice as we can in a world that can never really achieve it entirely. Due process protects every single one of us, including Sarah Jeong (I’ll refrain here from bringing up the Devil Speech from “A Man For All Seasons” once again). But thanks to postmodernism and in particular something called Critical Legal Studies—which started taking over law schools not too long after I left law school—we have an army of Sarah Jeong’s out there ready to tell us all what’s really what.
I first noticed something very very strange happening in academia when I went back there nearly thirty years ago, after a pause of nearly thirty years. I could not ignore what I saw; things had not gotten quite as extreme as they are now, but they were far more than halfway there. The younger students who were half my age were so different in their focus, so steeped in the idea that they were all victims or perpetrators or potential victims or perpetrators of sexual harassment or racism (or of just a word or two that didn’t quite sit well with them or someone else and therefore had to be eradicated and the perpetrator punished) that I did not recognize it as the world I knew.
Nor did it seem like a world that was going to lead to a better world. Not at all.
There are lots of advantages to being a victim. However, keep in mind that when you claim to be a victim you are claiming you cannot cope with and overcome adversity, in other words, you are a loser.
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2005/12/idiots-guide-to-victimhood-getting-it.html
In a time crunch, plan on commenting more later. For now:
. . . Jeong’s basic point is that she believes Jackie on some gut level despite everything; and that gut feelings like hers trump evidence. . . . [Neo]
We’ve seen this behavior before. Let me paraphrase this in a more historical vein: “The Academy believes, on some gut level that the sun moves around the earth and those gut feelings trump the equations of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus and Brahe.”
As in the past, believing is seeing.
Hey… maybe the patriarchy had a purpose……
keeping the bat chit crazy ladies from doing what they are told to do
not my problem…
im a white male…
good thing the ladies are so bad now, who would want them or their kids for any kind of meaningful union?
MAYBE, if you have dated a few of these, you might get MGTOW!!!
you wouldnt believe how far the ladies go with rhetoric
and no one can say anything about it from wanting all men exterminated decades ago, to this one, to the other stuff…..
glad they self exterminated…
too bad it wasnt fast enough
T:
I feel I must introduce a correction to your point about Galileo, the church, gut feelings, and facts. I wrote an article for PJ some years ago that dealt with that question. I will now quote from myself:
So the truth is much stranger than the legend, and much more complicated. It is not “Galileo=facts and evidence” and “church=beliefs in contradiction of facts and evidence.” That simplified “narrative” itself ignores quite a few facts and quite a bit of evidence.
I previously questioned whether we have a moral right insert ourselves into how the NYT runs it’s business. My premise was that if we don’t like it, we don’t have to read it (I already don’t).
Based on new evidence, I have become convinced that Sarah Jeong truly does not have the moral commitment to the truth that a journalist should have. I am further convinced that she is racist, misandrist, and generally a loathsome human being.
I think we have every right to condemn the NYT on their decision to hire her and retain her in light of her history and extremist views. But, other than public condemnation, I see no other recourse.
Did you have anything else in mind?
Does anyone believe that Jeong is entirely sane?
When ideological dogma trumps reality’s evidence, mental illness is demonstrated. Rhetorical question; When will we confront the Left’s demonstrated evidence of disconnection from reality?
My guess is not until the violence becomes intolerable.
Roy,
95% of today’s ‘journalists’ do not have the moral commitment to the truth that a journalist must have to justify their societal function.
There is no substitute for being raised and educated in a culture that embraces in principle an allegiance to objective truth.
Those journalists are every bit as responsible for America’s societal dissolution as any politician, academic or celebrity.
Should they succeed in our collectivist march toward the cliff’s edge, it will not end well for them.
Should they succeed in facilitating the continued flood of Hispanic and Muslim ‘refugees’, it will not end well for them.
Ironically and ultimately, the only way they survive is if they lose.
‘Kumbaya’ collectivist true believers and liberal useful idiots are always befuddled when the totalitarians seize power from them.
I believe she is entirely sane and her sanity will lead her to success or a mass grave.
Does anyone believe that Jeong is entirely sane?
See Prof. Sarah Deutch of the Duke history faculty, who seemed to think the accused Duke lacrosse players were guilty of rape when it had been revealed that the ‘victim’ had the DNA of at least four men in her various orifices, none of whom matched the 45 DNA profiles on file of the Duke Lacrosse team or the profiles of the 3 men Crystal Gail Mangum listed as ‘boyfriends’ and when the state attorney-general concluded a 4 month investigation and made an unusual declaration that the 3 players were ‘innocent of these charges’. This woman has a tenured position at one of our leading universities.
It’s perfectly acceptable in certain circles to adhere to grotesque social fictions. Sarah Jeong fancies Jackie Coakley’s absurd yard was true, which isn’t crippling bad judgment int he eyes of the New York Times.
Neo,
Thank you for the correction. I do not remember that article nor I have never had the need or occasion to do research on that issue. While my point might be valid, it would appear that in my example I am guilty of the same sin as Sarah Jeong; believing is seeing.
“Jeong’s post tortuously and often incoherently explains why it is imperative to continue believing the pseudo-victim, Jackie.”
Now, where have I seen/heard the phrase “fake but accurate” before??
Hmmm.
Journalism was stabbed to death a number of years ago.
As I have commented before, when you become politically correct you have to deny reality and live in fantasy land. Worst case, this is called schizophrenia. The PC also claim they are victims of oppression and persecution. Worst case, this is called paranoia. I was going to suggest that Sarah Jeong should consult a mental health professional, but the psychologists went full left long ago. They would probably tell her she is perfectly fine.
Old enough to remember the dangerous period 1968 into the mid 1970s, we have been here before. However, this time the msm/dnc/hollywood lackeys are supporting the far left with all they can muster, which is funded by people like Soros. Amazingly they believe they can win when the shooting starts, and it will start if they push beyond the point of no return. It seems they and their masters are determined to push beyond that point. Stupid. NRA membership expands, several more millions of firearms will be in private hands and tens of millions of cartridges will also be in private hands before 12/31/18. Private citizens in the USA own more firearms and ammunition than the entire world’s militaries and police, and it ain’t even close.
Granted private citizens do not possess artillery, tanks, or an air force but how hard would it be to acquire those assets? Not all of the military are PC, not by a long shot. Speaking of long shots, old farts like me can put a bullet in your eye at 800 yards.
This will not end well.
When you get rid of all empirical knowledge as a source of truth, we have a word for that: superstition. Sarah Jeong is no better than some ignorant aborigine in a jungle.
Of course, while believing these things she’ll tell you than she’s better than you.
Can Jeong write anything without using “the f word”?
Harvard Law — not impressed. She’s an awful writer.
In a parallel universe, she’s living in a Korea conquered by North Korea because those evil white men didn’t help defend the South. Hope her parallel universe self is enjoying it.
Diversity and bigotry. Color judgments and sanctimonious hypocrisy. A tale of denying individual dignity with good intentions and progressive (e.g. generational) conditions.
It would, of course, be a bad, evil thing to initiate violence against all those leftist professors and students. Nobody should do that: That way lies Stalinesque and Maoesque atrocities.
But allow me, briefly, to channel the way that leftists (mostly for the lack of any morally-constraining religious beliefs on their part) think about THEIR ideological enemies.
* clears throat *
How bad a thing would it be, really, if the leftmost 30% of all tenured university faculty, and the leftmost 15% of all university students, just gradually died off (natural causes) over the course of the next 5 years or so?
That’s a big number, so there’d be social costs. Funeral directors might be thrilled with the brief upswing. Crematoria would experience a market “bubble.” There’d be a need to hire replacement university faculty, of course. The 15% drop in recent university graduates entering the workforce would create a labor-shortage. And so on.
But 30% and 15%, respectively, aren’t too bad. Especially spread over 5 years. And the long term social benefits would be substantial, wouldn’t they? Granted, a few of those young lefties would have matured and eventually repented and turned to sanity. But we’re talking the left-most 15%. Sarah Jeong and Trigglypuff et alia.
No great loss, eh?
* cough *
If it sounds like I’m channelling not just the leftists themselves, but the devil, it’s because I’m pointing to the very real temptation.
The leftists (to repeat: mostly for the lack of any morally-constraining religious beliefs on their part) think this way about us. Not all, not often. And I’m not talking about “liberals”; I mean leftists. Like Sarah Jeong, who we can all agree was just expressing her opinions honestly to the world, without exaggeration, sarcasm, or jocularity.
If we are to remain morally sane, then even Sarah Jeong should be insufficient provocation to cause us to follow suit.