Author Archive: David Bernstein

THIS IS A PARODY ACCOUNT, BUT IT COULD HAVE BEEN THE BBC:

COMING SOON TO BERKELEY LAW SCHOOL: From the Brixton Palestine Solidarity Campaign. This is the inevitable next step in the Berkeley Law student groups’ “Zionist” boycott, and it smells a lot like Nazi and Stalinist antisemitic campaigns of old. If they aren’t doing it now, it’s not because they don’t want to.

THE IDEA IS SUPPOSED TO HOW TO REDUCE ANTISEMITISM, NOT HOW TO EFFECTUATE IT:

CHAT GPT, GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT SOUNDS LIKE IT MUST BE SATIRE, BUT IS ACTUALLY FROM AN ACADEMIC PAPER WRITTEN BY A FULL PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION AT A BIG TEN UNIVERTSITY: Here ya go:

Our choice to destroy the planet to serve our immediate/capitalistic/technology needs is a form of settler colonialism that perpetuates violence. That is, because a Western worldview does not consider plants, animals, and rocks as living beings of equal value with the same rights to this universe as humans, the result is that plants, animals and rocks suffer the same treatment as Indigenous peoples have endured throughout time. For example, like American Indians who were stripped of their lands and communities and forced to live in boarding schools, plants are yanked from their families and forced to assimilate into Western ways of doing things (e.g., to become suburban gardens). By respecting animals, plants, and even rocks as living beings, we can avoid some of the human/material binary that has plagued the sciences in the past.

NOT QUITE: I googled woke and trans. Google replied: “About 22,300,000 results.” Just for example.

I SEE PEOPLE CLAIMING THAT KANYE CLEARLY GOT HIS NUTTY ANTISEMITISM FROM “WHITE NATIONALISTS,” BUT I’M NOT SO SURE: For example, there is only one other public figure I can recall extolling Hitler’s virtues, and he isn’t a white nationalist.

“POTENTIALLY 2022’s MOST CONSEQUENTIAL AMERICAN BOOK”: Okay, this counts as shameless self-promotion, but how often do relatively obscure academics like myself get praise like that from someone as prominent as George Will, in a column devoted to said obscure academic’s book, no less? Money quote:

This story-beyond-satire of government is recounted in Bernstein’s slender (185 pages) Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classifications in America, potentially 2022’s most consequential American book. It reveals the rickety foundations of today’s identity politics. And because it is distilled in an amicus brief he filed for the Supreme Court as it considers racial preferences in college admissions. The brief demonstrates that such preferences depend on irrational classifications that mock their users’ intellectual and moral pretenses.

EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM! AGGREGATE WORLD HAPPINESS! OPERATIONALIZING CURRENCY!: Now that I’ve repeated the apparently magic mumbo-jumbo, where is my $36 billion to blow?

AT THE TIME NO ONE WAS REALLY PAYING ATTENTION: Diversity by diktat: An obscure 1977 OMB memo forms the basis for today’s affirmative-action programs. I don’t mention it in this op-ed, but to give you an idea of how ridiculously arbitrary the classifications are, the government literally got three volunteers, a Cuban American, a Mexican American, and a Puerto Rican, and asked them to come up with a name for people of Spanish-speaking ancestry, and to define the scope of the relevant classification. One of the volunteers vociferously advocated for “Hispanic,” which includes everyone with Spanish-speaking ancestry, and she wore the others down until they agreed. But the classification just as easily have been Latino (added in 1997), Spanish surname, Spanish-speaking household, Hispano, Mestizo, or Chicano/other Spanish-heritage, among other classifications floating around at the time. And the main reason Cubans were included with Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, despite having much higher socio-economic success and mostly perceiving themselves and being perceived by others as “white immigrants” rather than members of a minority group is that Richard Nixon had insisted on including them because they vote Republican. He wanted to make sure they were also eligible for affirmative action programs that were ramping up and included Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans. More details can be found in my new book.