Twilight of the Fake News Media

Mark Levin's new book raises important questions about the structure of the current news media.  The television stations were granted monopolies in the 1930s, and political support for the Democratic Party was an illegal precondition.  As well, the cable firms have been granted local monopolies, which are illegal because the firms are partisan in the information that they carry. The time has come to investigate the illegal use of public subsidy for partisan purposes and to use the anti-trust laws to balance the electronic news system.   Recent hearings in the Senate suggest that similar steps may need to be taken by tech firms like Google that use publicly subsidized infrastructure and air waves.

The Democratic Party Then and Now

Marcus Licinius Crassus*

Kamal Harris

I had Fox News on while working on my computer.   I was unnerved by the complacent, far-left  orientation of the second Democratic presidential debate. If this is what America's political system is producing, even given that the Democrats are the left party, the country is in serious trouble. 

We are looking at the stage of Roman decline when the plebeian party, the Populares, formed the First Triumverate and established the pathway to empire. We're well on the way to a Caesarean dictatorship. 

What I'm thinking is that establishing a second residence overseas will be a useful insurance policy.  Perhaps I can find a country that gives free healthcare to illegal aliens and isn't dominated by predatory criminals like Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Joe Biden.

*They hadn't invented the steam engine yet, but dictator wannabes were as prevalent then as they are now. 

The Glazov Gang's "Mitchell Langbert Moment"

Jamie Glazov of the Glazov Gang asked me to do a podcast on how conservatives can apply Alinsky's tactics in Rules for Radicals.  I will be doing a follow-up video on why universities became radical.

Groupthink and Academic Culture

Dan Klein gives a lecture on academic groupthink, tying in our joint paper and my "Heterogeneity" paper. Dan asks how groupthink can dominate entire academic disciplines.

Departmentally based decision making, collegiality, depends on majority vote.  Democratic processes are eminently susceptible to conformity pressure, as de Tocqueville noticed in the 1830s.

Scholars like Irving Janis (also Milgram and Asch) have suggested that groups tend to conform.  Love of people like ourselves, homophily, leads to the eradication of alternative viewpoints.  Highly intelligent people are easily capable of groupthink, as Janis's book Groupthink points out with respect to the Kennedy cabinet.  Klein points out that academic beliefs are more closely related to self-image than the decisions that Janis describes; the nature of academics' beliefs is closer to Jonathan Haidt's "sacred beliefs."

Klein uses the example of the  ideological field of history. At the departmental level, homophily leads to groupthink.  At the national level, the field's hierarchical hiring allows the elite universities to create a monotone ideological perspective.  Learned societies scour non-conforming academics by keeping them from publication opportunities.  "The profession answers these questions for all."

Universities are the reverse of what they appear. They do not encourage thought. They encourage mindless conformity.

Klein asks: "What if waiters worked as professors do, so each waiter job is controlled by a central waiter department?"  Of course, waiters are not as inept or incompetent as professors because there is no centralized waiters' learned society.